In 1994, the Lord Chancellor's recommendation put a law commissioner named Brenda Hale on the High Court bench, in the Family Division, even though she had never practised as a barrister: a background so unconventional for the role that the UK Supreme Court still notes it in her official biography. The Lord Chancellor was James Mackay, Baron Mackay of Clashfern, who held the office from 1987 to 1997 and spent the decade rewriting who could argue a case, and who could judge one, in the courts of England and Wales. He died on July 7, 2026, at 99.

His signature reform, the Courts and Legal Services Act 1990, received royal assent that November. Under its terms, recorded at legislation.gov.uk, solicitors gained the right to argue cases in the higher courts for the first time, ending the Bar's exclusive hold on that work, and litigants gained access to conditional fee arrangements: the "no win, no fee" claims that changed who could afford to sue at all.

Mackay also let judges speak to journalists without asking his department's permission first, a change from the practice he inherited, according to the WS Society, the Edinburgh society of solicitors to the Supreme Courts of Scotland. Hale herself, the Family Division judge he had promoted in 1994, rose in 2017 to become the first woman to lead the UK Supreme Court. Those same years in office saw two other firsts pass through the system his department administered: John Roberts became the first Black QC at the English bar in 1988, and Patricia Scotland, at 35, became the first Black woman to take silk in 1991. Scotland later served as Secretary-General of the Commonwealth.

Mackay was born in Edinburgh on July 2, 1927, and did not start out as a lawyer at all. He won a scholarship to George Heriot's School, took an MA with honours in mathematics and natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh in 1948, taught mathematics at the University of St Andrews, and held a postgraduate scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge, before he returned to Edinburgh to study law. He graduated with an LLB, with distinction, in 1955, and was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates that same year. Three years later he married Elizabeth Hymers, and the couple went on to have three children.

He took silk in 1965, served as Sheriff Principal of Renfrew and Argyll from 1972 to 1974, and, after serving as Vice-Dean from 1973, was elected Dean of the Faculty of Advocates in 1976, the leader of the Scottish bar. Appointed Lord Advocate, Scotland's senior law officer, in 1979, he was created a life peer that same year as Baron Mackay of Clashfern, with the territorial designation of Eddrachillis in Sutherland. He sat as a judge of the Court of Session from 1984, became a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary the following year, and on October 27, 1987, Margaret Thatcher made him Lord Chancellor. John Major kept him in the post; he did not leave it until 1997. Along the way the Royal Society of Edinburgh elected him a Fellow in 1984 and awarded him its Royal Medal in 2003, and from 1991 to 2005 he served as Chancellor of Heriot-Watt University.

Mackay's own account of that decade leaned on his faith. In his valedictory speech to the House of Lords on his retirement in 2022, at 95, he said, "I believe that I have been sustained until now by answers to what we pray for at our opening every day," as the Christian Institute reported. Fellow peers marking that retirement recalled his "forensic thinking and analysis," in the words of the Liberal Democrat Lord Shipley, a "wisdom that melds both logic and personal values," as the Labour peer Lord Tunnicliffe put it, and a "characteristic kindness," in the recollection of Labour's Lord Hacking. When the House of Lords was told of his death this July, the Attorney General, Lord Hermer, said, "Lord Mackay, across all parties, was a hugely respected figure. He was a giant in the law," and the Shadow Attorney General, Lord Wolfson of Tredegar, called him "a great conservative, a great lawyer, a great Lord Chancellor, and also a man of profound Christian faith," according to STV News. The Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, Roddy Dunlop KC, called him "a towering figure in the law of Scotland and the United Kingdom," and the Lord Advocate, Ruth Charteris KC, remembered that he "remained unfailingly humble," the Scottish Legal News reported.

What Mackay changed in the law outlived his decade in office. Solicitors still argue in the higher courts of England and Wales under the framework his 1990 Act established, and conditional fee arrangements remain, decades later, how people without savings can bring a civil claim at all. Brenda Hale, the judge he promoted to the Family Division in 1994, carried that unconventional judgment all the way to the presidency of the Supreme Court. In 2007 the WS Society made him Lord Clerk Register and Keeper of the Signet, a Scottish legal office older than the peerage he had carried since 1979, a fitting last office for a mathematician who spent four decades reworking the rules of two legal systems.