Lord Bingham of Cornhill, who died on September 11 aged 76, was one of the outstanding English judges of the 20th century, and the first to hold the three top judicial posts of Master of the Rolls, Lord Chief Justice and senior law lord.
A charming and broadly cultivated man, Tom Bingham was revered as a judge of supreme intellect and lucidity, as well as for being exceptionally fair and for consistently upholding human rights and the rule of law against the worst excesses of legislative and government action.
Old-fashioned in demeanour – he was once described as exhibiting "vintage old-fashioned courtesy" – Bingham was less so in outlook. His room in the Royal Courts of Justice was festooned with modern art, which was reflected in his forward-looking approach to justice.
In 1989 he became the first judge to speak out strongly in favour of the Conservative government's proposed reforms of the legal profession – in particular the proposal to dismantle the Bar's monopoly of the right to appear as advocates in the High Court. He infuriated some of his colleagues by declaring that the greatest threat to the Bar was not the green paper but "the profession's reaction to it".
He accused the Bar in its opposition of delivering a message of "doom, decline and decay" and said that Lord Mackay of Clashfern's proposals weakened none of the pillars on which the justice system rests. "We delude ourselves," he said, "if we do not suppose there is not a large body of responsible, middle-of-the-road opinion that regards the legal profession as riddled with anachronistic conventions and privileges."
But he conceded that judges still needed to maintain a degree of remoteness, remarking that "It would be undesirable if we slipped over to El Vino's [the traditional haunt of Fleet Street lawyers and journalists] and were jugging it up with the boys."
When he succeeded Lord Donaldson as Master of the Rolls in 1992, Bingham was only too happy to find himself at the heart of the implementation of Mackay's reforms, the most revolutionary in civil justice in the last century, opening up the rights of audience to employed barristers and solicitors, and encouraging alternative dispute resolution, of which he declared himself a "fervent advocate".
He gained a reputation as someone who combined administrative ability with great sensitivity, and whose liberal instincts were tempered with sound practical judgment.
When Lord McKay made him Lord Chief Justice after Lord Taylor's sudden retirement due to ill health in 1996, Bingham became the first judge since Lord Alverstone in 1900 to make the leap from Master of the Rolls. His appointment was unexpected and caused a stir because of his inexperience in criminal law, but his obvious abilities quickly won over the doubters.
His style was very different from that of his predecessor. He did not, like Taylor, have a series of highly publicised run-ins with the Home Secretary. Nor did he pursue the same path as a media-friendly judge, with Question Timeappearances and regular media interviews. Instead he limited himself to one press conference a year; and whenever he did have a policy to pursue, he preferred to do so discreetly, behind the scenes – or, at most, from his seat in the Lords. As a result he was barely known to the public at large, and could pass unremarked in almost any street in the land.
Mackay had told him that he need not do the job for life, as was customary, and in 2000 Bingham accepted Lord Irvine's offer for him to become senior law lord – technically a step down the judicial ladder, even though the Lord Chief Justice sits in a lower court.
His appointment came in the aftermath of the Pinochet affair, in which the law lords had been obliged to set aside one of their own rulings because Lord Hoffmann had failed to declare his links to Amnesty International; and again it was deemed unconventional, since he was by no means the longest-serving law lord. However, Bingham strongly refuted suggestions that his appointment was a bid to "shake up" the highest court.
He likened his new role to being "the conductor of an orchestra with a group of very experienced and talented instrumentalists", and saw it as his job to steer the law lords towards being a supreme court that would occupy the same constitutional position as those in the United States and elsewhere.
In his view, the separation of Britain's highest court from parliament would remove any potential conflict that had arisen whenever law lords ruled on issues on which they had previously spoken at Westminster. But he was adamant that the British court should not follow the American model and could never challenge the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty by having the power to strike down acts of parliament. The new supreme court eventually came into being in 2009, a year after his retirement as senior law lord.
The son of a Protestant Ulsterman, Thomas Henry Bingham was born on October 13 1933 and grew up at Reigate, Surrey, where both his parents practised as doctors; a friend remembered them as "high-minded" professionals, dedicated to the public good.
Tom won a scholarship to Sedbergh, the Cumbrian public school renowned at the time for its Spartan regime of cold baths, short trousers and cross-country runs. He rose to become head boy and was regarded as the cleverest boy at the school in living memory.
After doing his National Service with the Royal Ulster Rifles (he later joined the TA), he went up to Balliol, Oxford, where he won a Gibbs Scholarship and took a First in Modern History. As an undergraduate he was "very thin and intense-looking", remembered his friend John Keegan, the military historian, "with the male ideal of good looks... It was always clear to us that he was going to do great things. He was a very funny speaker. Balliol was full of debating societies, and Tom belonged to all of them."
After graduating, he read for the Bar as Eldon Law Scholar and, after passing top in his Bar exams, he was called by Gray's Inn in 1959.
Taken on as a tenant at Leslie Scarman's chambers in Fountain Court, he established a thriving practice in general common law and commercial work. He spent four years as Standing Junior Counsel to the Ministry of Labour (later the Department of Employment) before taking Silk in 1972, aged just 38. He was one of the most elegant advocates at the Bar, at his best in the Court of Appeal, where the regular interchanges with the bench demand an extremely quick mind and clear mastery of points of law.
Bingham first came to wider public attention in 1977, when the Foreign Secretary David Owen appointed him to head the politically charged inquiry into allegations of breaches of UN trade sanctions against Rhodesia. His report the next year caused a sensation with its conclusions that oil companies had knowingly contravened the sanctions with the complicity of British civil servants.
A Recorder of the Crown Court since 1975, Bingham was appointed Judge of the High Court, Queen's Bench Division, in 1980, and a Judge of the Commercial Court, and promoted to the Court of Appeal in 1986.
In the year prior to his becoming Master of the Rolls, he led the high-profile inquiry into the collapse of Bank of Credit and Commerce International. His report contained a stinging indictment of the Bank of England's "deficient" supervision of the fraud-riddled BCCI, observing that the B of E had showed a "marked lack of curiosity" and that there had been "a tragedy of errors, misunderstandings and failures of communication".
Bingham was often described as a liberal with a small "l", and when asked about the description he admitted that he "wouldn't want to be called illiberal". He was suspicious, however, of the notion that the law lords could be easily categorised. "They're curiously unpredictable," he said. "I don't think any of us aims to be consistent. I actually regard consistency in a judge as a vice."
Nevertheless, he could very rarely have been described as conservative. Soon after becoming Master of the Rolls he was the first senior judge to call for the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into domestic law – which came about with the Human Rights Act in 1998. Within a year of the convention coming into force, the destruction of the World Trade Centre and subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq ushered in a period of peculiarly authoritarian antiterrorist legislation. Some of these powers were curtailed by the law lords, and many of their more significant judgments were written by Bingham.
Prominent among these was the Belmarsh prison case in 2004, in which he and seven fellow law lords decided that to detain foreign terrorist suspects indefinitely without charge contravened the Convention on Human Rights. As senior law lord, Bingham delivered the characteristically measured 47-page lead judgment, and afterwards found himself hailed by The Guardian as "the radical who is leading a new English revolution". He did not want to be seen as a campaigning political figure, but conceded that he regarded liberty, one of the values protected by the convention, as of "immense importance".
Bingham was never afraid to take controversial positions. He called the cannabis laws "stupid" and supported their relaxation; he welcomed the growing trend towards judicial review and backed the international criminal court in the face of American criticism.
In 2008, shortly after standing down as senior law lord, he said that in his opinion Lord Goldsmith's advice to the then-Prime Minister Tony Blair on Britain's invasion of Iraq was "flawed" because "it was not plain that Iraq had failed to comply in a manner justifying resort to force and there were no strong factual grounds or hard evidence to show that it had"; moreover, he argued, it was up to the entire Security Council to decide whether Iraq had failed to comply with the resolution.
One of Bingham's few setbacks came when he stood for election as Chancellor of Oxford University in 2003, for which he launched his own website with a section headed "Tom's supporters". In the end his inability to dissimulate – he said publicly that university tuition fees were necessary – undermined his campaign, and he was defeated the by the former Conservative party chairman Chris Patten. "I'd be a terrible politician," Bingham said at the time. "I've never agreed with a single party long enough."
His wife once stood as a Social Democrat candidate in a council election, but he himself strongly resisted any identifiable political affiliations – though friends would have been surprised to discover that he was a Tory.
Away from the law, Bingham enjoyed mountaineering and walking. For many years he had a remote cottage near Hay-on-Wye in the Welsh Marches where he enjoyed reading, planting trees, mending fences and acting as president of the literary festival.
Even Bingham's judicial colleagues admitted that they could find him "frighteningly clever" at times, one of them observing that he could appear "very austere, very critical. But it is usually that he is just thinking of the implications... he is always several points ahead of everyone else."
His slightly reserved though never pompous manner was sometimes taken as shyness, yet at other times he could seem relaxed and outgoing, and he was often very funny. By nature kind and modest, he was none the less also an excellent speaker – clear and instructive in lectures, and highly entertaining after dinner and at the Hay Festival.
Bingham's publications included The Business of Judging (2000) and, most recently, The Rule of Law (2010), a characteristically accessible explanation of such notions as equality before the law, respect for human rights and procedures that safeguard fair trials. As one reviewer wrote, the book also functions as an insight into "a special kind of mind": "Tom Bingham is a Lord Denning of sorts, but one with discipline in place of egoism" and "a consistent rather than selective sense of right and wrong".
In 2005, Bingham was appointed a Knight of the Garter, the first judge to be accorded that honour.
Tom Bingham married, in 1963, Elizabeth Loxley, with whom he had two sons and a daughter.
Extract from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/law-obituaries/7997574/Lord-Bingham-of-Cornhill.html
