August 19, 1914 - December 8, 2005

THERE WAS nothing flamboyant about Rose Heilbron’s style of questioning. In court cross-examining, she was precise, persuasive and direct. Her ability to seize on the salient facts and destroy her opponent’s case made her renowned as a defence barrister, with successes in some of the most notable trials of the day.

There was then no other woman at the Bar of her stature, fulfilling a promise that singled her out from the time she first decided to take up the law as a profession and led eventually to her becoming a High Court judge. As such she won a reputation for careful erudition and compassion.

Rose Heilbron was born in 1914, the daughter of a Liverpool boarding house keeper, and educated at Belvedere School. When she graduated as LLB with first-class honours from Liverpool University as top of her year, she was reported as being one of the only two women in the country to hold the degree and the following year she was Lord Justice Holker Scholar at Gray’s Inn.

She then became one of only two women LLMs and was called to the Bar in 1939. Eventually she was to be Gray’s Inn treasurer and leader of the Northern Circuit.

In 1949 she was one of the first two women to take silk and the first to lead in a murder trial as a defending counsel — in the Liverpool Cameo Cinema murder case.

Few could rival her record of success as a defence lawyer. She appeared in 1951 for Anna Neary, acquitted of murdering a woman in her bath. Heilbron won freedom for Mary Standish who stood trial for the alleged murder of her husband. She defended Dennis Patrick Murtagh who was tried for murdering a man with his car; he was acquitted when she appealed against his conviction. In 1955 she defended Jack “Spot” Comer accused of participating in a stabbing in Soho in which another man was injured: he walked out of the Old Bailey a free man, praising her skill.

Her mind was razor sharp, sometimes anticipating the end of a judge’s point before he had finished making it and displaying her eagerness to reply.

Perhaps her crowning triumph at the Bar was in 1970 when her successful appeal to the House of Lords resulted in an important ruling on the liability of landlords of premises where cannabis has been smoked. The press eulogised her prowess, finding it remarkable at the time that she could combine such a demanding career successfully with family life.

In 1952 she spoke up on behalf of professional women who, having married and had children, wanted to resume their careers. She said in a lecture at Manchester University that it was wasteful to the community that a woman who was fully trained and qualified for the professions should, probably on marriage and certainly on the advent of a family, have to relinquish her outside occupation. Little attention had been paid to the idea that when a woman’s children grew up she could go on to serve the community as a skilled woman still in her prime.

As long ago as 1950 Rose Heilbron was prophetic about equal pay for women, which, she said, pressure of public opinion would eventually force. “But prejudice against women is still rampant,” she told the Women’s Group on Public Welfare.

Her own career continued to be something of a breakthrough. Heilbron became Britain’s first woman recorder, at Burnley, in 1956, though not the first woman judge in English legal history with the power to try indictable offences. A year later she was the first woman to sit as a Commissioner of Assize and in 1972 the first woman to sit as a judge at the Central Criminal Court. In 1974 she was sworn in as the second woman High Court Judge and was assigned to the Family Division.

One of her most significant rulings was over the right of a woman and her unborn child. In 1987 a student father-to-be took his fight to the Court of Appeal after Mrs Justice Heilbron ruled that he was not entitled to stop his girlfriend having an abortion. In an unprecedented action, the unnamed Oxford student, aged 23, had sought an order on behalf of himself and his unborn child on the ground that an abortion would be an offence. But Heilbron gave the abortion the go-ahead. She ruled that in law the foetus, which was nearly 18 weeks, had no legal standing to bring an action through the father to keep itself alive. Within 36 hours of the precedent having been made she won the backing of three Appeal Court judges and three law lords.

In 1975 she was appointed by the Home Secretary to head a committee of inquiry into the rape laws. She said the laws allowed the victim to be put on trial instead of her attacker. It was wrong for a woman’s private life to be made public as a way of throwing doubt on her evidence. One of her findings was that names of rape victims should be kept secret. The report called for tougher curbs on the freedom of defence lawyers who might try to destroy the victim’s character in the witness box.

When she retired in November 1988 she won praise from Sir Stephen Brown, president of the Family Division, for delivering fair and speedy justice. To the end of her career, she put into practice her own high standards.

She married in 1945 Dr Nathaniel Burstein, a general practitioner in Liverpool. They had a daughter, who also went into law and who became a QC.

Dame Rose Heilbron, DBE, a judge of the High Court of Justice, family division, 1974-88, was born on August 19, 1914. She died on December 8, 2005, aged 91.