Bill Cornish was a pioneering scholar in the fields of intellectual property law and modern legal history. His 1981 book, Intellectual Property: Copyright, Trade Marks and Allied Rights, was instrumental in establishing the subject as an academic discipline in British universities. Topics which had previously been treated in separate practitioner texts were now brought together in a work informed by a social scientific approach to legal study, which included comparative, historical and interdisciplinary perspectives. He also made significant contributions to legal history, with his 1989 book Law and Society in England 1750–1950, and his contribution to the Oxford History of the Laws of England.
Posted to Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy, 22