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It appears that the long running saga of the appointment of the twelfth justice of the Supreme Court might be about to come to an end.   We last blogged about this on 6 February 2010 when we dealt with various “revelations” about the process. Older readers will recall the story of Mr Jonathan Sumption’s application and then withdrawal which was the subject of earlier post. It seems that an announcement is now imminent – nearly 6 months after the establishment of the Court..  Frances Gibb has a piece on the Times Law Central Blog yesterday under the headline “New Supreme Court Justice? Any day now …” in which she says “Law Central understands that any day now the new Supreme Court justice will be announced – and the hot tip is Sir John Dyson”.

Meanwhile occasional Kreminologist Benjamin Pell has pointed out to us that yesterday the Supreme Court website finally removed the item about “Justice of the Supreme Court selection commission” from its website.  Perhaps another sign of an imminent announcement.

As we have previously mentioned, Justice 12 was listed to sit on a number of appeals this term but has, up to now, been replaced in each one by another justice.  Some cases for next term are now being listed with panels of 4 (for exampe, In Re Application for Judicial Review by “JR17”) – which suggests that Justice 12 will be sitting by then.

Meanwhile, the commentators continue to suggest that Lord Justice Dyson is, in Frances Gibbs’ words “the hot tip”.  We note, however, that Lord Justice Dyson has recently been added to the constitution of the Court in the case of Thornton v Telegraph Media Group Ltd which is due to be heard on 29 March 2010.   It is, of course, possible that he could sit as a member of that Court as “Supreme Court Justice Dyson”.  We await developments.