High Court Later in 1966, Lane was appointed a Justice of the
High Court, assigned to the
Queen's Bench Division, receiving the customary
knighthood. He was elected a
Bencher at Gray's Inn the same year. He delivered some notable judgments: in 1968, he awarded damages against a school for a pupil who had been injured in 'horseplay' between his peers, saying that the school had a responsibility to stop it from getting out of hand; and while acting as an appeal judge, he found for the publishers of
Last Exit to Brooklyn who had been convicted of publishing an
obscene book, because of faults in the trial Judge's summing-up. He was chosen to head the inquiry into the
Staines air disaster in 1972, and concluded that the underlying cause was an undiagnosed heart condition of the pilot which impaired his judgement, coupled with the pilot's known bad temper which led to his junior crew being unwilling to challenge him.
Court of Appeal and House of Lords Lane was made a
Lord Justice of Appeal in 1974. He was one of the appeal judges in
Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council's appeal to keep its
grammar schools rather than be forced by the government to adopt a
comprehensive system, and joined in the judgment that found for Tameside and brought a halt to comprehensivisation. Lane's judgment was personally critical of
Fred Mulley, the
Secretary of State for Education and Science for being "far from frank" about his reason for intervening in Tameside. In another high-profile case in 1977, Lane joined in dismissing an appeal against deportation from
Mark Hosenball, an American journalist working for the
Evening Standard. In 1978, Lane found for the
Labour Party and against its dissident members (
Paul McCormick and
Julian Lewis) who tried to win control of Newham North East Constituency Labour Party from the party's
National Executive. Lane became a
Lord of Appeal in Ordinary on 28 September 1979, receiving as a
law lord additionally a
life peerage as
Baron Lane, of
St Ippollitts in the County of
Hertfordshire. He had been appointed by the new
Lord Chancellor,
Lord Hailsham, soon after
Margaret Thatcher won the
1979 general election. The overdue retirement of
Lord Widgery, whose physical ill-health and increasing dementia had become a suppressed scandal, led to Hailsham picking Lane to follow him as
Lord Chief Justice from 1980. His return to the
Court of Appeal was welcomed in the legal profession, where Lane was regarded as a genial figure ("Geoffrey Dawson, Baron Lane. Good to have you back again."), but eventually not welcomed by Lane himself, who disliked the work.
Lord Chief Justice Shortly after taking over as Lord Chief Justice, Lane attracted political controversy when he called for a general reduction in prison terms. His appeal judgments frequently cut the length of sentences and he was known to be a member of the
Prison Reform Trust. He had served as deputy chairman of the
Parole Board from 1970 to 1972. After the publication of lengthy interviews with members of the jury in the trial of
Jeremy Thorpe, Lane supported moves (later made in the
Contempt of Court Act 1981) to ban any publication of reports from within the jury room. Lane also opposed the proposal to extend rights of audience in the higher courts to solicitors. One of the areas of crime in which Lane did not support shorter sentences was rape. In 1982, Lane stated that sentences for rape should include immediate prison time, except in the most exceptional circumstances, which was taken as an implied rebuke for a Judge who had attracted controversy for fining a rapist
£2,000 and saying that the victim was "guilty of a great deal of
contributory negligence". Lane made it clear he rejected the general concept that victims of rape could have given their attackers an excuse. Much later in his career, Lane was responsible for a judgment in the case of
R v R which for the first time held that a husband could be guilty of raping his wife, overturning the
irrebuttable presumption at
common law that a wife consented to sex with her husband. Many observers regarded Lane as a defender of traditional 'Victorian' morality rather than a supporter of mild feminism. In 1983, he gave the
Darwin Lecture at
Cambridge, in which he stated that he believed that the word "gay" should not be used to mean homosexual, and that instead the term should be "homosexuals, and/or buggers". ==Disputed convictions==