Right of Reply Dr Eyimofe Atake, SAN, recently concluded in these pages that a female Judge is properly addressed as “My Lady” or “Your Ladyship”. In a Rejoinder, Mr Sylvester Udemezue refuted this position. Dr Atake’s Reply addresses each of the ten headings in Mr Udemezue’s Rejoinder. None appears to survive Introduction The question sounds small: how should Counsel address a female Judge? The answer decides how a learned profession speaks to the women who now lead it. A recent article in these pages concluded that the correct mode is My Lady or Your Ladyship. Mr Sylvester Udemezue has contradicted that conclusion here, with a courtesy this reply returns. His case stands on three legs: that My Lord is a technical title of the judicial office, like consideration; that Nigeria has its own settled convention; and that reform belongs to the competent institutions. Each leg breaks in turn. 1. Only a Person Can Be Spoken To An office is an idea. It has no ears and wears no robe. When counsel rises, the words travel to the human being on the Bench, and every English form of direct address, Sir, Madam, My Lord, My Lady, is shaped to fit that person. Madam itself is the French ma dame, which means my lady, so every lawyer who has said Madam to a woman has already conceded the case. Nor is Your Lordship an escape, for it is only My Lord said more politely, and its partner is Your Ladyship. His point that My Lord does not turn a female Justice into a man answers an argument nobody made, for a wrong description never changes the thing described; it only discredits the describer. Now comes the decisive point, and it is his own concession. His section on the history records that when women reached the English Bench, the practice adapted to My Lady. Pause on that. If the address belonged to the office, no adaptation would have been needed, because only the persons had changed. His own history proves that the address follows the person. The whole tradition testifies the same way. The Crown of the United Kingdom never dies, yet on 8 September 2022 the Queen’s Bench became the King’s Bench, R changed from Regina to Rex, and every Queen’s Counsel woke a King’s Counsel. The same English High Court makes a male appointee a Knight and a female a Dame, and Brenda Hale led the United Kingdom’s final court as Lady Hale, never as Lord Hale. If the sovereign, the bench and the silk gown all bend their style to the person, why would the Nigerian courtroom alone stand outside grammar? 2. A Term of Art Needs a Maker, and This One Has None His most interesting argument is this: courtroom language is technical, like consideration or injunction, so My Lord has become a sexless technical title meaning simply the Judge. The premise is correct, and it destroys the conclusion, because every technical meaning in the law exists only because some authority created it. Judgments fixed the meaning of consideration, statutes fixed the meaning of service, and his own best example, the corporation that counts as a person, exists only because section 18(1) of the Interpretation Act says so. No special meaning floats free; every one has a maker. So the question is simple: who made this one? Where is the statute, Rule of Court or Practice Direction which says that My Lord means a Judge of either sex? There is none, and he concedes it, for no instrument, on his own account, touches the point. That concession decides the issue, because a claimed meaning with no authority behind it is only a habit in Latin dress. A second difficulty follows: every word on his list is spoken about, while My Lord is spoken to a living person’s face, so they are not even the same kind of word. His remaining comparisons fail the same tests. The reasonable man is an imaginary figure, spoken about and never spoken to, and the law is retiring him in favour of the reasonable person, an example of the law correcting a masculine form. Genesis uses man for the species and then pairs the persons, “male and female created he them”, and nowhere is Eve addressed as Sir. The claim that My Lord has quietly evolved into a neutral title fails its own test. A meaning changes only when the whole community accepts the new one without protest, and this very debate proves the usage contested rather than changed. If the word were truly neutral, nobody would resist My Lady; yet they resist her with energy, and the heat of the defence gives the meaning away. Even a vacation greeting among female Judges saluted Dear Sisters while hoping that my Lords were enjoying the holiday, in which no office was being addressed at all. 3. Lord Has Had Its Feminine for a Thousand Years The comparison with the female Professor mixes up two families of words. Professor, Doctor, Judge and Justice are common gender words, for which English mad
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