CCLS establishes new Professor Sir Roy Goode CBE QC chair in commercial law

Queen Mary College, University of London's Centre for Commercial Law Studies (CCLS) has advertised a new Professor Sir Roy Goode CBE QC Chair in Commercial Law. Sir Roy (pictured) was the founding director of the centre and was instrumental in obtaining funding for the Crowther Chair in Credit and Commercial Law. This funding represented one of the first funded chairs in an English law school and served as a template for later funding arrangements between professional firms and insolvency scholars, i.e. CMS Cameron Mckenna and Professor Milman, Baker & McKenzie and Dr Frisby, Geldarts LLP and Professor Walters, Norton Rose and Sir Roy, Herbert Smith and Professor Fletcher, KPMG and your faithful correspondent. 

Professor Ian F. Fletcher also became a director of the CCLS in the mid-1990s. There is therefore a long history of insolvency law and scholarship at the centre which makes this an interesting development for the CCLS, but also for the development of insolvency law as a discipline as Sir Roy, together with Professor Fletcher, are both early pioneers of our subject and past directors of the CCLS.


Looking back in 100 years time it may be the case that this new chair is viewed with the same esteem as the Sir Ernest Cassel Chair in Commercial Law at LSE, where previous illustrious incumbents have included:

• Professor Lord Chorley QC (chair holder between 1930 and 1946); 
• Professor Sir Otto Kahn-Freund FBA QC; 
• Professor LCB 'Jim' Gower (chair holder at the age of 35 and held the post between 1948 and 1952 - see an obituary here and an appreciation here); 
• Professor Lord Wedderburn FBA QC (chair holder between 1964 and 1992); 
• Professor Sir Ross Cranston FBA QC, (chair holder between 1992 and 1997); 
• and Professor Paul Davies FBA QC (chair holder between 1998 and 2009 - the current Allen & Overy Professor of Corporate Law at Oxford - who also have the Lovells Professor in Law and Finance in the shape of Professor John Armour). 
• The current Cassel Professor is Professor Michael Bridge (formerly, inter alia, Hind Professor of Commercial Law in the University of Nottingham).

Picture Credit: http://www.ccls.qmul.ac.uk/images/CCLS-conference_hon_pres2.jpg