Margaret Booth

Dame Margaret Myfanwy Wood Booth, DBE (11 September 1933 – 1 January 2021) was a British judge. Education and career Her father was told by a cousin in the early 1950s, "Don't put your daughter in to law; there is no place for women in the law" but the family ignored this and Margaret Booth was called to the Bar in 1956 after studying law at University College London, having won a scholarship from Middle Temple. In 1976 she took silk, becoming only the tenth woman appointed a Queen's Counsel. In January 1979, she became the third woman to be appointed as a High Court judge. Like her predecessors, Elizabeth Lane and Rose Heilbron, she was assigned to the Family Division. In 1980, she chaired a committee that unanimously called for no-fault divorce, yet the Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Bill only reached the House of Lords in the days following her death. She retired from judicial office in 1994.