Dame Rose Heilbron, DBE (19 August 1914 – 8 December 2005) was a British barrister who served as a High Court judge.

[3] She was awarded the Lord Justice Holker scholarship at Gray's Inn in 1936,[3] and she became one of only two women to hold a master of laws degree in 1937.

Her rapid rise may have been aided by the fact that so many men were in the armed forces in the Second World War during her first six years as a barrister.

[2] In 1946, in Adams v Naylor, she represented two boys injured in a minefield on the beach between Crosby and Southport in a claim against an army officer; the unsuccessful appeal to the House of Lords contributed to the Crown Proceedings Act 1947.

By 1946, Heilbron had appeared in ten murder trials,[3] and in 1949, just a few months after the birth of her daughter, she was one of the first two female King's Counsel at the English Bar (the other was Helena Normanton).

He reportedly said that he was not "having a Judy defend [him]", but he later praised her for her painstaking defence, which led to her being named the Daily Mirror's "Woman of the Year".

She led in several other important cases, included Ormrod v Crosville Motor Services on vicarious liability in 1953, and Sweet v Parsley on the presumption of a requirement for mens rea in criminal offences in 1970.

(Sybil Campbell was appointed a metropolitan stipendiary magistrate in 1945, and Dorothy Knight Dix was the first woman to preside at a jury trial in 1946, as deputy recorder of Deal).