Institute of Commercial and Corporate Law Annual Lecture 2025

Lord Sales, Justice of the UKSC to deliver the ICCL Annual Lecture 2025

‘Directors’ Duties and Climate Change’

Indicative abstract

Climate change poses a challenge for our societies. The climate change emergency, as it is increasingly coming to be called, is already having impacts on the financial and business worlds. Those worlds also make their contribution to the problem. Do they have the ability to change their activities to lessen that contribution? Does the law in relation to the duties of company directors have a role to play? Lord Sales will reflect on these questions in what promises to be a fascinating and intellectually rich lecture.

Biography

Lord Sales read law at both Churchill College, Cambridge, and Worcester College, Oxford, before being called to the Bar of England and Wales at Lincoln's Inn in 1985.  He was appointed First Treasury Junior Counsel in 1997. He was an Assistant Recorder from 1999 to 2001, Recorder from 2001 and 2008, and Deputy High Court Judge from 2004 and 2008.  Lord Sales became a Queen's Counsel in 2006 and continued to act in the re-named post of First Treasury Counsel Common Law until his appointment to the High Court, Chancery Division in 2008. He was a member of the Competition Appeal Tribunal between 2008 and 2015, and Vice-President of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal between 2014 and 2015.  Between 2009 and 2014 Lord Sales served as Deputy Chair of the Boundary Commission for England. He was appointed as a Lord Justice of Appeal in 2014, before becoming a Justice of the Supreme Court in January 2019.

Host: Professor Daniel Attenborough

This event is in-person only in the Hogan Lovells Lecture Theatre.

Photographs

Photographs will be taken during the event which may be published on the Law School’s website and posted on the Law School’s social media and likewise on the Durham University student Law Society’s website and posted on their social media. If you end up in a photo taken at the event and would prefer not to be published, please email daniel.attenborough@durham.ac.uk.