University of the West of England
Stephen Brown has been awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the development of the Family Division of the High Court. Stephen Brown was deputy chairman of the Staffordshire Quarter Sessions (1963) and was appointed Queen’s Counsel in 1966. He became recorder and honorary recorder for West Bromwich in 1972 and in 1975 a judge of the High Court Family Division and later the Queen’s Bench Division. During the late 1970s and early 1980s he was presiding judge of the Midland and Oxford Circuit. He was a member of the Parole Board in England and Wales from 1967 to 1971, and later served on the Butler Committee on Mentally Abnormal Offenders and on the Advisory Council on Penal Systems. He was chair of the Advisory Committee on Conscientious Objectors between 1971 and 1975. In 1983 after becoming a privy counsellor, he served as a Lord Justice of Appeal for five years, followed by an 11-year period as president of the Family Division of the High Court.