Dame Jennifer Roberts, who has died aged 71, was a High Court judge who in 2014 tried the biggest matrimonial finance case ever to come before the courts in England.
The case of Cooper-Hohn vs Hohn, a dispute between the British hedge fund manager Sir Christopher Hohn and his estranged American wife Jamie Cooper-Hohn, was listed for trial over 10 days. In an interim judgment given on July 7 2014, Mrs Justice Roberts recorded that “the assets available for distribution have a value of at least $1.3 billion”.
As if the size of the assets, the complex structures in which they were held and the convoluted legal principles in play were not enough, she had to deal, in a courtroom packed with journalists noting her every word, with a dispute between the media and Sir Christopher Hohn about what could or could not be reported.
Her reserved judgment in the main case, given on December 12 2014, was a colossal piece of work, running to 105 pages. She found the matrimonial assets to amount to $1.5 billion (£870 million) and awarded the wife the then-record amount of $530 million (£330 million) or 36 per cent of the assets, but not the 50 per cent the wife had sought.
She justified a departure from the equal division of the assets by reference to the then current doctrine of “special contribution” by the money-maker, which permitted the court in its search for fairness to give credit for truly exceptional or extraordinary wealth creation.
Unusually for the time, Mrs Justice Roberts declined to anonymise her judgment and allowed the full details of her factual findings to be reported. In family law circles the judgment was regarded to be a tour de force, a model of clarity, lucidity and, above all, fairness and justice.
What the world did not know when she embarked on the case was that she had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. Although she had been advised that she needed to undergo surgery and to start chemotherapy immediately, she refused to do so until she had concluded hearing the case. By the time she began writing the judgment in the summer vacation of 2014, she had already commenced that brutal treatment.
She continued to sit in the Family Division hearing cases throughout her treatment, scheduling medical appointments to take place before the court day began. Even though the professional and personal pressures on her were vast, nobody ever heard a word of self-pity or even complaint fall from her lips.
Jennifer Mary Halden, universally known as Jenny, was born on March 3 1953 in Southampton, the eldest of three siblings. Her early years were spent in Sudan, her parents having met and married in Khartoum at the end of the Second World War. One of Jenny’s younger brothers, Flying Officer Ian Halden, was killed piloting a Phantom fighter jet in an accident in the Falkland Islands in 1991.
After leaving school she worked briefly in London, modelling and working at Island Records. In her thirties, with two young daughters, she enrolled at Southampton University to read law, combining her studies with her roles as wife and mother. She was awarded a first-class degree. Later, in 2017, that University would award her an Honorary Doctorate of Letters.
In 1987 Jennifer Roberts read for the Bar and was called in 1988 by the Inner Temple. She obtained a pupillage at the chambers of Roger Gray QC at Queen Elizabeth Building, and was duly offered tenancy.
It did not take her long to build up an impressive practice in both financial and children work. Later she concentrated on high-value matrimonial finance cases, taking silk in 2009.
In chambers her grace, elegance, good looks and perfect manners won her the affectionate nickname of “duch*ess”. In common with most very successful barristers, she had an appetite for hard work, excellent judgment and complete command of the facts of her cases. What marked her out from other high-flyers, however, was her unflappable manner and her compassionate care for her clients, qualities which inspired complete confidence from litigants often battered by their experiences of divorce.
A judicial colleague, Sir Nicholas Francis, recalls acting as counsel in a case in Essex many years ago where Jenny Roberts was his opponent. In the corridor outside the courtroom, he admits having said something “irritatingly tetchy”.
Her response was not to threaten to complain to his Head of Chambers, nor even to slam her pen down on the table. Instead, he recalls, “she paused, adjusted her Ferragamo scarf, brushed an imaginary speck of dust off her pale Chanel jacket, looked me in the eye and smiled at me.”
He concluded, like so many of Jenny’s opponents: “I learnt more in those 10 seconds than I have in 100 drubbings from those less civilised than you.”
Jenny Roberts became a Recorder on the Western circuit in 2000, after only 12 years at the Bar. Though very much a family specialist, she was well able to tackle criminal work and also produced some impressive written judgments in a range of civil cases.
As a deputy High Court judge from 2011 she produced several extensive judgments including a fact-finding decision in a private law children case, running to 189 paragraphs, given shortly before her elevation to the High Court bench. At the judges’ meeting on 29 April 2014 (to which she had been invited) there was speculation over whether, in the light of the recent transfer of Mr Justice Charles to the Queen’s Bench Division, the mantle of writing the Proustian-length judgments “on which the reputation of the Division depends” would pass to her.
She did not disappoint. On her appointment as a High Court judge on June 3 2014, she was immediately ticketed by the then President of the Family Division, Sir James Munby, as a “money judge”. He threw her straight in at the deep end, assigning her Cooper-Hohn vs Hohn. Her career went from strength to strength, with an impressive output of massive judgments, which were rarely successfully appealed.
A notable case was Christina Estrada vs Walid Juffali in 2016. This was a claim for financial relief following a foreign divorce. It was to be decided by reference to the criterion of the “reasonable needs” of the claimant alone, there being no marital accumulation of assets to be equitably shared. Among her annual needs the wife had claimed the extraordinary sum of £1 million each year for clothes and accessories.
Mrs Justice Roberts recorded, in a literary style reminiscent of Cicero’s, that this included “£40,000 for a new fur coat every year; £83,000 for 15 new co*cktail dresses every year; £80,000 for a special gown annually; £109,000 for seven haute couture dresses annually; £197,000 for two white tie jewellery sets every year; £79,000 on co*cktail dress jewellery sets every year; £58,000 for two luxury handbags every year; £23,000 for six casual handbags every year; and £35,000 on ten clutch handbags every year”.
With cool understatement this claim was dispatched as being “inflated and unnecessary in the context of adequate provision for her reasonable needs”. Even so, Mrs Justice Roberts found that Ms Estrada’s annual income needs amounted to £2.5 million which was capitalised in the sum of £44 million.
It used to be said of Mr Justice McCardie back in the 1930s that he had an unbounded knowledge of the price of women’s clothes, but it can safely be said that in that sphere he was comprehensively eclipsed by Mrs Justice Roberts.
Away from judgments, Mrs Justice Roberts was an assiduous Family Division Liaison Judge on the Western Circuit. She also chaired the Family Justice Council’s Financial Needs Working Group which produced, with the aim of harmonising practice in England and Wales, the definitive guide to “financial needs” following divorce and the dissolution of civil partnerships.
Mrs Justice Roberts was diagnosed with terminal cancer in September 2023. The next nine months were a personal Calvary, but she continued working above and beyond the call of duty, dealing with judicial matters remotely even when prevented from sitting in court by the punishing demands of her treatment and the progression of her illness.
In 1971 she married Richard Roberts, who died in 2004. She is survived by their two daughters.
Dame Jennifer Roberts, born March 3 1953, died June 10 2024
