Scots Law News
| Author | Scott Wortley,Hector L MacQueen |
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2011.0056 |
| Published date | 01 September 2011 |
| Date | 01 September 2011 |
| Pages | 343-351 |
Sad news of the death of Lord Rodger of Earlsferry on 26 June 2011. He had been ill with the effects of a brain tumour since the early spring.
Alan Rodger was the greatest Scots lawyer of his generation as well as a highly distinguished scholar with an academic publications record that any full-time professor would have been proud of. And he was a highly stimulating and entertaining social companion. He would have mocked the cliché, but he has been taken from us while still at the height of his remarkable powers.
The bare facts of Alan's glitteringly varied career can be simply told. He was born and educated in Glasgow (Kelvinside Academy, Glasgow University) before moving to take a DPhil in Roman Law at Oxford under the supervision of Professor David Daube (previously of Aberdeen). Daube became the most significant intellectual influence on Alan's thinking about and approach to law in general. The DPhil thesis, published in 1972 as
Amidst all this, his academic achievements led to his election as a Fellow of the British Academy in 1991 and as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1992. He ascended the Scottish bench in 1995 and in 1996 succeeded Lord Hope of Craighead as Lord President and Lord Justice General. In 2001 he joined Lord Hope as one of the two Scottish judges in the House of Lords; and when that court was transformed into the UK Supreme Court in October 2009 the two became the first Scottish Justices in that institution. Although he never lost touch with the Scottish university law schools (for example, he was an Honorary Professor at Glasgow, and received honorary degrees from Edinburgh and Aberdeen as well as Glasgow again), he loved Oxford, becoming for example the university's High Steward in 2008 and Visitor of Balliol (in succession to the late Lord Bingham) in late 2010 as well as helping out with the teaching of Roman law in the university after the death of the Regius Professor of Civil Law, Peter Birks, in 2004.
As a judge Alan was in the forefront in what has turned out to be the greatest challenge ever to face the courts, not only in Scotland but also in the United Kingdom as a whole: the impact of the Human Rights Act 1998 coupled with, in this jurisdiction, the Scotland Act of the same year. While some of his analyses and conclusions may be challenged by others on legal and (for Alan, irrelevantly) political grounds, there can be no doubt of the rigour and vigour which he with others brought to what turned out to be an enormous and far-reaching task.
Alan eschewed any form of “legal nationalism”, indeed could be fiercely critical of some of its manifestations. Some of that can be seen in his Wilson Lecture of 1995, later published as the very first article in the
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