Proudman vindicated

“These tweets would not have been pleasant for any judge to read,” the barristers’ disciplinary tribunal said in a ruling published last week. “The remarks may even be thought to be hurtful. But they are not gravely damaging to the judiciary and in our judgment it is not arguable that they are. We take the view that the judiciary of England and Wales is far more robust than that.”

With those words, a three-person panel dismissed all five charges of professional misconduct brought by the Bar Standards Board against Dr Charlotte Proudman (pictured arriving for the hearing last December).

Each charge related to a chain of 14 tweets that Proudman published on 6 April 2022, in which the barrister had commented on a judgment delivered by the former High Court judge Sir Jonathan Cohen in a financial remedies case where she had been junior counsel.

“The question we have to deal with,” said the tribunal in its ruling, “is whether it is arguable that what was tweeted by Dr Proudman went beyond the bounds of permissible conduct from a professional person in her position. We have been greatly assisted in assessing this by the case of Morice v France.”

The tribunal continued:

These tweets are almost all statements of opinion, save where we have already mentioned an issue of fact that was incorrectly put forward by Dr Proudman; and all of them are concerning a matter of public interest. Are they unfounded and gravely damaging to the judiciary?

Our answer is no. They were robustly expressed opinions on an important matter of public interest. They were moreover opinions which a rational and conscientious lawyer was entitled to express without losing the protection that Morice illustrates is provided by article 10 [of the human rights convention].

We do not condone them; that is not our function. Our function is to determine whether it has been established by the Bar Standards Board to the civil standard that Dr Proudman has lost her article 10 protection because what she tweeted was so factually unfounded and so gravely damaging to the judiciary as to amount to professional misconduct.

We do not consider that it came close to that.

For the latest episode of A Lawyer Talks, I asked Proudman how she felt about her regulator spending tens of thousands of pounds of the profession’s money on bringing charges against her that the tribunal threw out without even calling on her to respond.

We recorded the interview a few days before the ruling was published but, as you’ll hear, Proudman didn’t hold back. She also spoke frankly about being sexually assaulted by male barristers.

And we discussed the media storm that led the Daily Mail to accuse her nearly 10 years ago of being a “feminazi”. I asked her if — with the benefit of hindsight — it had been a good idea to go public about unwanted attention she had received from a more senior member of the bar.

Proudman also reflects on these incidents in her new book He Said, She Said, which will be published on 1 May. Subtitled Truth, Trauma and the Struggle for Justice in Family Court, it offers revealing insights into some of the women she has represented and reveals how her own family background has helped her to understand the vulnerabilities of clients and their children.

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