Goff, Robert, 1926-2016

Robert Goff, Lord Goff of Chieveley, will be remembered as a master of common law technique, a creative and original scholar, and for twenty-three years a judge of the highest distinction, latterly as Senior Law Lord at the apex of the UK’s legal system. As a scholar, he, with Professor Gareth Jones, disinterred the law of restitution in England and Wales and in their 1966 book The Law of Restitution sought to place it on a principled basis. As a judge, he was involved in many fundamentally important decisions at all levels and was pivotal in the authoritative acceptance by the House of Lords in Lipkin Gorman v Karpnale Ltd of restitution as an independent branch of law founded on the principle of unjust enrichment.

Posted to Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy, XVIII