FAREWELL LORD DENNING by Phillip Taylor

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FAREWELL LORD DENNING
by Phillip Taylor

March 1999

News that Lord Denning died on March 6th 1999 at the age of 100 was greeted with universal sadness by his many friends at the Bar and to the wider public. To generations of law students, Lord Denning was held in the highest regard as a visionary amid the complexities and pomposity of the law.

It was always a privilege to meet Lord Denning who was a charming man possessed of a twinkling good humour which I, and many others, will certainly never forget.

The common law has lost, just before the year 2000, the greatest judge of the twentieth century. One appreciation I read remarked that his controversial decision in the High Trees case (1947) on promissory estoppel remains an authority still relied on in courts today. As Professor Sir John Smith has put it, Lord Dennings "judgments continually made one think about the law by challenging accepted concepts". He was an exciting judge, and a by-word for the law itself as Lord Irving described him.

The Times described Lord Denning as the plain man's judge and concluded in a moving leader: "Lord Denning did much to reduce the legal worlds aura of privilege. Millions heard or saw this grammar school boy, born at the dawn of broadcasting, argue hard cases in his distinctive Hampshire burr and make them, by his clarity, understandable. As judge, as man and as advocate with whom laymen could identify, Tom Denning both symbolised and nurtured the maturing of British democracy in the century spanned by his life".

Farewell.

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