Lord Rodger–Jurist then Judge

Abstract

The title of this lecture plays a little with the title of the book—Judge and Jurist: Essays in Memory of Lord Rodger of Earlsferry—the publication of which we are gathered here to celebrate.1 At one level my title describes a chronological fact: that Alan Rodger's career began in the groves of academe before he moved to the realms of gold that led ultimately to the bench. I will try to explain why he made that transition, drawing on letters that he wrote at the time: not only the ones to his family much quoted in Judge and Jurist, but also some to his erstwhile doctoral supervisor David Daube now preserved in the Daube archive in Aberdeen University Library.2 The dating of the family letters, not always straightforward—in fact something of a palingenetic exercise—is, I think, significant. But I also want to discuss another point arising from one of the most striking features of Judge and Jurist: the contributions from the Supreme Court Justices on a range of aspects of Alan Rodger the judge.3 These are however only the beginnings, or so I want to suggest, of a full study of that subject. My observation is that the judge cannot be separated from the jurist. This is not just a matter of the use of Roman law in Alan's judgments.4 The intellectual discipline he developed as an academic researcher in Roman law informed the way he went about the business of judging. He himself told us as much, in a lecture he gave in Aberdeen in 2001,5 so I make no claims of a sudden, startling new insight; but I want to elaborate the nature of that intellectual discipline, and then illustrate his