Author Professor Sir Ross Cranston

Roy Goode who has died at the age of 93 was the outstanding academic commercial lawyer of the last 50 years. Future lawyers will find it hard to beat his combination of wide-ranging penetrating legal scholarship academic entrepreneurship and impact on the world. What is remarkable is that all this was from someone who due to financial constraints left school at 16 never went to university and had never taught yet became a professor of commercial law at Queen Mary University of London aged 38 later professor of English law at the University of Oxford and a renowned authority around the world.

Roy had qualified as a solicitor in 1955 after completing five years as an articled clerk (apprentice) at a one-person firm in Portsmouth in the south of England arranged...