Janet Smith (judge)

Dame Janet Hilary Smith, DBE (born 29 November 1940), styled The Rt Hon. Lady Justice Smith, is an English judge and former High Court Judge and President of the Council of The Inns of Court. She is perhaps best known as the judge who prepared The Shipman Inquiry, a report on the activities of the British serial killer Harold Shipman. On 21 November 2002, Smith became the fourth woman to be promoted to the Court of Appeal, but has since retired from that role.

Smith is a Covenor of the cross-party political movement, More United.

Smith was born in , Cheshire, and attended Bolton School. She married, before being called to the Bar in 1972.

In February 2013 she was assessed as one of the 100 most powerful women in the United Kingdom by Woman's Hour on BBC Radio 4.

She practised in Manchester for 20 years, specialising in personal injury and clinical negligence cases. After being appointed QC in 1986, she was appointed by Lancashire County Council in 1991 to hold a public inquiry into reported abuse of autistic children at Scotforth House in Lancaster. She was appointed a High Court judge in 1992 (and received the customary appointment as a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire). As a High Court judge, she was involved in the trials of many notable homicide cases.

Smith prepared The Shipman Inquiry, the report on the activities of the British serial killer Harold Shipman. The results of her year-long inquiry were published on 19 July 2002, and concluded that Shipman, jailed for life in January 2000 for 15 murders committed between 1995 and 1998, had murdered at least 215 patients since March 1975, also stating that there was a real suspicion that he had murdered as many 260 people. Smith never found any real motive for Shipman's killings but said, "It is possible that he was addicted to killing. He betrayed his patients' trust in a way and to the extent that I believe is unparalleled in history."

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