Legal history will be created next January when one of the last all-male bastions of the British establishment admits a woman for the first time.

Dame Brenda Hale, one of three women judges in the court of appeal, will become the UK's first woman law lord and one of the 12 judges who will sit in the proposed new supreme court.

Her appointment comes amid government moves to end the white, male, public school stranglehold on the judiciary, including a proposed independent judicial appointments commission with a brief to make the judges more representative of the people they serve.

Lord Falconer observed soon after he took over as lord chancellor in June that Britain had never had a woman in its top court, the House of Lords. "What other country can you say that about?" he asked.

The US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand all have women judges in their highest courts.

Canada, which had its first woman supreme court judge in 1982, now has three out of nine and is headed by a woman chief justice.

Dame Brenda, 58, who was tipped by the Guardian to become the first female law lord, has had an unusual career which could become more common under the plans to widen the pool from which judges are selected.

Unlike all her peers in the top court, who had long careers at the bar, she practised only briefly and spent most of her career after graduating from Cambridge as a university law teacher, rising to become a professor of law at Manchester University.

As Brenda Hoggett - the surname of her first husband, which she dropped when she became a high court judge to revert to her maiden name - she joined the Law Commission, the official law reform body, in 1984.

While there she spearheaded groundbreaking changes to the law on children, divorce and mental health, including the Children Act and controversial no-fault divorce reforms which were eventually dropped by the government.

She was vilified by the Daily Mail which questioned why a "dangerous feminist" was in charge of reforming the law of marriage.

In 1993 she was the first academic lawyer to be appointed to the high court bench when she was made a judge of the family division.

The mother of a grown-up daughter, she remarried in 1992 to Julian Farrand, the former pensions ombudsman, now a visiting professor at London Metropolitan University.

Dame Brenda has forcefully argued for more women judges, noting in a lecture published in the journal Public Law: "There are plenty of able lawyers around from whom to pick a judiciary which would be more reflective of the general population - more women, more religious and ethnic minorities, more varied social and educational backgrounds, more varied professional backgrounds.

"This matters because democracy matters. The judiciary may or should be independent of government and parliament but ultimately we are the link between them both and the people. We are the instrument by which the will of parliament and govern ment is enforced upon the people.

"We are also the instrument which keeps the other organs of the state, the police and those who administer the laws, under control.

"It does matter that judges should be no less representative of the people than the politicians and civil servants who govern us."

She has also criticised the QC system, telling barristers at their annual conference that the system had a "knock-on effect on the appointment of a more diverse and reflective judiciary" because high court judges were drawn almost exclusively from QCs.