Lord Justice Scrutton remains, with a handful of other great common law judges such as Lord Mansfield, Willes J and, more recently, Lords Goff, Hobhouse and Mustill, among the pre-eminent exponents of legal principle in commercial law. Scrutton must figure in anyone’s “first team” of twentieth-century British judges. His name will live on as long as there remains a Scrutton on Charterparties and Bills of Lading—now in its 22nd edition. Yet to many lawyers his name is simply synonymous with irascibility and intemperate comments in judgments about the inadequacy of counsels’ submissions or the decision under appeal and even, on occasion, the conclusions of the House of Lords in previous cases with which he did not agree. Outside the law, no one even remembers that he was the judge in the infamous “Brides in the bath” murder trial.

Now David Foxton has produced what must be the definitive biography of “TES”. In proper Scrutton fashion, the facts are recorded, his decisions are explained and the myths are exploded. This book is the result of far-reaching and meticulous research by Mr Foxton, who has somehow found time to write a full-scale legal biography (as well as a string of previous publications) alongside a very successful practice as a QC in the field where Scrutton was master. Mr Foxton’s achievement is as magnificent as it astonishing that he has found the time to do it.

Scrutton came from a wealthy, non-conformist family of shipowners and shipbrokers, who were strong supporters of the Liberal Party. He was himself an agnostic. His firm instructions that he should be buried “without any of the idle forms of the Christian religion” were not obeyed, probably because the note was found too late. Scrutton went to Mill Hill, then a school aiming to give a “modern” education to the sons of non-conformists. The Scrutton family had close connections with the school and at one stage saved it from bankruptcy.

After that, Scrutton embarked on a seven-year career as a student, relentlessly collecting ever more distinguished degrees and prizes at UCL then Cambridge, in both philosophy and law. At Cambridge he grew a beard, which he trimmed only later in life. The beard and his great height gave Scrutton his characteristic commanding presence in court as both advocate and judge. Mr Foxton shows that Scrutton was not simply a workaholic at Cambridge. He helped found the famous Cambridge Moral Sciences Club (of Wittgenstein and Popper argument fame) and the Cambridge University Bicycling Club, as well as becoming President of the Union. His life-long love of golf came slightly later. He was apparently more enthusiastic than proficient.

Scrutton’s immense capacity for hard work continued at the Bar, where his practice was, at first, quite general. In 1883 he published The Laws of Copyright and he produced three further editions until the Copyright Act 1911 changed the law too significantly for the work to be continued. He produced books on legal history and land law before publishing his great work The Contract of Affreightment as Expressed in Charterparties and Bills of Lading in 1886. The book set out the law on carriage by sea in a systematic way for the first time and it has become a classic legal text.

Mr Foxton deals at some length with Scrutton’s involvement in Liberal politics in the 1880s and early 1890s. He wanted reform of the House of Lords, Home Rule for Ireland (he was a member of the influential “Eighty Club” along with Oscar Wilde), a redistribution of the ownership of land and better education for all. Scrutton was an unsuccessful Liberal candidate in the Irish Home Rule election in 1886. Mr Foxton acknowledges that, although Scrutton did not owe his career to his political connections, they were valuable to him and helped raise his professional profile.

Lawyers and judges who have not been involved in a host of dramatic criminal trials which interest the general reader present a problem for the biographer: how to deal with a succession of