President of the King’s Bench Division Dame Victoria Sharp retires from the judiciary
King's Bench DivisionDame Victoria SharpPresident of the King's Bench DivisionNews
Dame Victoria Sharp is retiring from the judiciary and as President of the King’s Bench Division and Deputy Head of Criminal Justice after an illustrious career in the judiciary.
Dame Victoria became the first woman to lead the King’s Bench Division, the High Court’s largest division, in 2019 and the first woman Deputy Head of Criminal Justice in 2020.
During her time as President, the work of the King’s Bench Division encompassed the general civil work of the High Court, the Administrative Court, the Planning Court, the Media and Communications List, the Commercial Court and the Technology and Construction Court. Dame Victoria has also overseen the work of High Court judges sitting across the country trying the most serious criminal cases, including cases on the Terrorism List.
During her tenure, the Division has navigated significant change. The introduction of CE File to the Division in 2019 marked a major transition from a paper based to a digital system. The resilience of the Division was also demonstrated during the covid pandemic, when new methods of working ensured that the administration of justice continued without interruption.
Over more than a decade in senior judicial leadership, Dame Victoria has been a leading advocate for greater transparency in the justice system and for reform and modernisation. She led the introduction of livestreaming in the Court of Appeal and the broadcasting of sentencing remarks in the Crown Court. As President, she also steered the courts through the covid pandemic, including in her role as Deputy Head of Criminal Justice, when the criminal courts continued to sit – making England and Wales one of the few jurisdictions in the world to do so at that time.
More recently with the proliferation of Artificial Intelligence, and its use in the justice system, Dame Victoria has reflected on the risks and opportunities of its use in recent lectures and speeches including in the The Mayflower Lecture 2025 and in a highly influential speech on judicial independence in the age of AI, Without Fear or Favour: Judicial Independence, Past, Present and Future.
Dame Victoria has sat in the Court of Appeal and the Divisional Court since 2013, hearing many of the most significant cases in this jurisdiction and giving landmark judgments across the full spectrum of civil and criminal work. These have included appeals against the life sentence imposed on Wayne Couzens, the appeal by those convicted of the manslaughter of PC Harper, decisions on the lawfulness of the use of facial recognition technology by the police, on the use of tracking technology by Google and on national police guidance on non-crime hate incidents, in the Assange extradition case, and on the misuse of AI by lawyers.
Dame Victoria read law at Bristol University and was called to the Bar (Inner Temple) in 1979. She took silk in 2001 and began her judicial career as a Recorder in 1998. She was appointed as a Deputy High Court Judge in 2008, and a High Court Judge of the Queen’s Bench Division (now King’s Bench Division) in 2009. She was a Presiding Judge on the Western Circuit from 2012 to 2013 and was appointed as a Lady Justice of Appeal in 2013. She was appointed as the Vice-President of the Queen’s Bench Division (now King’s Bench Division) in January 2016. See Dame Victoria’s reflections on her life and career in the law in a talk with the Chair of the Bar Council (external link).
Dame Victoria said: “It has been a great privilege to have been a serving judge, to have been Deputy Head of Criminal Justice and to have led the King’s Bench Division for seven years, including through the pandemic. I would like to pay tribute to the judges of that Division and to the judiciary more generally for everything they do to support the administration of justice in this country, often under very difficult circumstances. I wish my successor well.”
Dame Victoria’s final day as President of the King’s Bench Division was yesterday (Wednesday 30 September 2026).