Jim Gower — an Appreciation

DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.t01-1-00134
Date01 March 1998
Published date01 March 1998
THE
MODERN LAW REVIEW
Volume 61 No 2March 1998
Jim Gower – an Appreciation
Professor L.C.B. Gower – known round the world as Jim – died on Christmas Day
1997, just short of his eighty-fourth birthday. He was a founding member of this
Review and thereafter its steadfast supporter. We have therefore particular reason
to mourn his loss, but even more to celebrate his achievements. Gower was the first
editor of the MLR for Cases and Statutes. He believed strongly in its mission to
treat the whole of English law – legislation as well as case law – from a functional
perspective, with a major emphasis on its social underpinnings and the processes of
its reform.
This tribute is not intended as a systematic biography. It seeks to epitomise
Gower as an educator, as a law reformer and as a company lawyer. Something,
however, must first be said about his own development as a lawyer, since it helps
to explain the continuities in his varied professional life.
His father decided that he should train as a solicitor and set about finding him
articles. During the search, an alternative, then somewhat unusual, course was
uncovered: it was possible first to take a law degree and then do the necessary
training, which would in consequence be reduced from five to three years. Gower
therefore went to University College, London, where he acquired a first-class
degree before he was twenty. Then he took articles with Smiles & Co of Bedford
Row (by Gray’s Inn), completing an LL.M. during the same period. Out of this
intense academic and practical training was formed a legal scholar with a detailed
knowledge of the workings of the legal system.
For more than a decade, it was unclear where the major course of his profes-
sional life would lie. In 1936, Gower became an assistant solicitor in Smiles & Co,
and later a partner, retaining a connection until his departure for Nigeria in 1962.
Equally, in 1936–38, he held a full teaching post at UCL and, among other things,
joined the team which launched the MLR. Theo Chorley, then Cassel Professor of
Commercial Law at LSE, became the first General Editor but otherwise the leading
spirits were from UCL. Gower left UCL for practice, disliking the requirement to
teach six or seven subjects. Yet the inclination for academic work was well
implanted and it was maintained particularly through his continuing friendship
with Arnold Goodman and Dennis Lloyd, both of whom had connections with the
UCL Faculty.1War service intervened,2but after its end, Chorley joined Attlee’s
ßThe Modern Law Review Limited 1998 (MLR 61:2, March). Published by Blackwell Publishers,
108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 127
1 Arnold Goodman, later Lord Goodman, solicitor extraordinary, was a fellow law student with Gower
at UCL and a close friend for life. Goodman’s autobiography, Tell Them I’m on my Way (London:
Chapmans, 1993), is dedicated to Gower. Dennis Lloyd, later Lord Lloyd of Hampstead, had a pre-
war career at the Bar and joined the UCL Faculty as Reader in 1947. He became the Quain Professor
of Jurisprudence in 1956.
2 Goodman, Gower and Lloyd enlisted together in the 48th Light Anti-Aircraft Battery under (Sir)
Mortimer Wheeler, archaeologist: for some escapades, in the version according to Goodman, ibid
ch 3.

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