Michael Dishington Scott is Chief Justice of Tonga.

Scott is a British national with a long career in the Pacific. He has previously served as a judge in Kiribati

Kiribati

Kiribati , officially the Republic of Kiribati, is an island nation located in the central tropical Pacific Ocean. The permanent population exceeds just over 100,000 , and is composed of 32 atolls and one raised coral island, dispersed over 3.5 million square kilometres, straddling the...

 and the Solomon Islands

Solomon Islands

Solomon Islands is a sovereign state in Oceania, east of Papua New Guinea, consisting of nearly one thousand islands. It covers a land mass of . The capital, Honiara, is located on the island of Guadalcanal...

, and served for 14 years as a judge on the High Court of Fiji. As a High Court judge in Fiji, in Yabaki v President of the Republic of the Fiji Islands, he ruled that the interim government established in the wake of the 2000 Fijian coup d'état was legal. This ruling was later overturned on appeal. From 2004 to 2007 he was a judge of the Fijian Court of Appeal

Court of Appeal (Fiji)

The Court of Appeal of Fiji is one of three courts established by Chapter 9 of the Constitution, the others being the High Court and the Supreme Court. The Court of Appeal was a new institution established when the 1997 Constitution came into effect; the other two courts predated it...

.

He was appointed Chief Justice of Tonga in August 2010, replacing Anthony Ford

Anthony Ford

Anthony Ford is a judge of the Employment Court of New Zealand and a former Chief Justice of Tonga.Ford is a New Zealander. He was admitted to the bar in Auckland in 1970 and worked as a lawyer, specialising in employment and commercial law and defamation. In 2000, he was appointed as a judge of...

. He assumed the role on September 27, 2010.