Sir William Young became a Non-Permanent Judge of the Court of Final Appeal in 2025.
Sir William Young was born in New Zealand in 1952. He holds the degrees of Bachelor of Laws from the University of Canterbury and Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Cambridge.
He was admitted as a barrister and solicitor of the Supreme Court of New Zealand in 1975 and became a Queen’s Counsel in 1991.
Sir William was appointed to the High Court of New Zealand in 1997 and then to the Court of Appeal in 2004, becoming President of the latter Court in 2006. He was promoted to the Supreme Court of New Zealand in 2010, where he served as a permanent judge until his retirement in 2022. He continued to sit in the Supreme Court as an acting judge until 2024.
He has served as a judge in other jurisdictions: in 2022 as an Ad-hoc Justice of Appeal of the Court of Appeal of Seychelles and on the Court of Appeal of Samoa (since 2022) and the Supreme Court of Fiji (since 2023).
Sir William Young is an honorary Bencher of the Middle Temple and an honorary Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. In 2007, he was appointed a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (re-designated as a Knight Companion of that Order in 2009). He was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Laws by the University of Canterbury in 2013.