In a post two days ago, I discussed the inane attack on Justice Alito for including the 17th-century English jurist Matthew Hale among the authorities he cites for the common-law treatment of abortion. In the course of noting that Justice Kagan and Justice Breyer had also cited Hale as an authority on the common law, I observed that Kagan “respectfully refers to ‘Lord Matthew Hale,’” whereas “Alito uses the lesser honorific ‘Sir.’”
An erudite reader informs me that Kagan’s more respectful title for Hale is also wrong:
Matthew Hale never was “Lord Matthew Hale” and to call him that is as wrong as calling a President a “Prime Minister” or a knight a “king.” Justice Kagan ought not to have referred to him as such. “Lord Firstname Lastname” is a title of honor, and only a (younger) son of a duke or of a marquess is “Lord Firstname Lastname.”
He personally did not wish to have a title of honor and attempted to resist the knighthood (a title of honor) that traditionally accompanied being named Chief Baron of the Exchequer (that is, the head of the Court of Exchequer—a title of office) in 1660. Famously, Lord Clarendon and King Charles II had to resort to a ruse in order to get Hale into the physical presence of the King, who knighted him on the spot. From that moment, he became “Sir Matthew Hale.” When he became Lord Chief Justice of England in 1671 (a title of office), he remained “Sir Matthew Hale,” although—only while actually encumbering that position—he might (informally) have been referred to as “Lord Justice Hale” or (even more informally) as “Lord Hale.” But those were titles of office, not titles of honor and thus the “Lord” bit would have vanished when he left office. In no event would his Christian name have followed the word “Lord.” Thus, Winston Churchill twice was First Lord of the Admiralty, but no one would ever have referred to him as “Lord Winston Churchill” on that account, as he was a grandson of a duke, not a (younger) son of a duke.