Mike Redmayne 1967–2015
| Author | Paul Roberts |
| Published date | 01 October 2015 |
| Date | 01 October 2015 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1365712715596721 |
| Subject Matter | Memorial |
Memorial
Mike Redmayne 1967–2015
Mike Redmayne died of prostate cancer on 10 June, a week shy of his 48th birthday. He continued
researching, writing and teaching at the LSE through repeated treatment cycles until the final weeks
of his life, and bore his illness throughout with extraordinary stoicism and fortitude. Characteristically,
he seemed most concerned not to burden friends and colleagues with worry for him or to put anybody to
unnecessary trouble. As tributes have poured into my email inbox this week from Evidence scholars
around the world, the recurrent theme, in addition to extolling his brilliant mind and preeminent scholar-
ship, has been the warmth, generosity and collegiality of Mike’s unpretentious style of academic excel-
lence. Amongst friends and colleagues, Mike inspired esteem and affection in equal measure. Global
Evidence and Proof scholarship has lost, far too prematurely, one of its most genuinely nice guys, as
well as an original thinker and intellectual leader.
Mike was a member of the inaugural International Journal of Evidence & Proof Editorial Board—
serving for a period as Noticeboard Editor—and remained active on the Board for as long as his strength
permitted. Mike McConville, whose brainchild The International Journal of Evidence & Proof was,
recalls that Redmayne was one of the first names on the teamsheet, even though Mike was at that time
only a junior lecturer with a smattering of publications to his name. Having been the external examiner
for Mike’s Birmingham PhD, McConville—a shrewd judge of academic talent—immediately recognised
Redmayne’s potential as a rising star; a prediction that was rapidly vindicated by a continuous flow of
high-qualitypublications and, less visiblybut hardly less impressively to thosein the know, by a great deal
of labour-intensive refereeing and exceptionally skilled editorial input in the production of The Interna-
tional Journal of Evidence & Proof, and later also for the Modern Law Review and Criminal Law Review.
Mike’s two major monographs book-end his career. The first, on Expert Evidence and Criminal
Justice (Redmayne, 2001), developed out of his PhD thesis, but was effectively a new book. It
features one of the first, and still one of the best, systematic expositions of the probabilistic foundations
of DNA evidence for a legal audience. Some of the analysis was prefigured by an article carried in this
journal’s first volume (Redmayne, 1997), and which has recently been republished in an edited anthol-
ogy on Expert Evidence and Scientific Proof in Criminal Trials (Roberts, 2014). This material remains
as fresh, informative and incisive as the day it was written. The name Redmayne has of course subse-
quently become synonymous with scientific evidence. Mike revisited the topic in print on several further
occasions (see e.g. Aitken et al., 2011), and lent his invaluable expertise to the endeavours of the Royal
Statistical Society’s Working Group—now a permanent RSS Section—on Statistics and the Law in
developing practitioner guidance for lawyers and forensic scientists (www.rss.org.uk/statsandlaw).
Mike’s second monograph, on Character in the Criminal Trial (2015), was formally launched at the
LSE at the end of April. Mike temporarily left hospital to participate (‘the doctors have let me out for the
night’) and was on sparkling form, in defiance of his ailing physical health. The book is a magisterial
treatment of a perennially fascinating set of evidentiary issues, about which a great deal could—and
will—be written. In its scope, this monograph challenges conventional disciplinary taxonomies; in its
combination of minute doctrinal analysis, normative theorising, institutional epistemology and policy cri-
tique, Character in the Criminal Trial sets the standardfor what contemporary Evidenceand Proof scholar-
ship can, and should,be. I never heard Mike describe himself as a theorist; but quite apart from his natural
modesty, his methodology implies thattheorising is already integralto the best evidentiary scholarshipand
The International Journalof
Evidence & Proof
2015, Vol. 19(4) 207–208
ªThe Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1365712715596721
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