Career
Burrows was educated at Prescot Grammar School and Brasenose College, Oxford, where he received his MA (First Class, Martin Wronker Prize for the best result in Law Finals 1978) and subsequently took the BCL (First Class). [2] He then studied for an LL.M. degree at Harvard University. He was a lecturer at the University of Manchester from 1980 to 1986, a fellow and lecturer at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford from 1986 to 1994, a visiting professor at Bond University and research fellow at ANU in 1994, and a Law Commissioner for England and Wales from 1994 to 1999. [3] His work as a Law Commissioner included co-authorship of the Law Commission's Report No. 242 (Privity of Contract: Contracts for the Benefit of Third Parties), published in 1996 under the chairmanship of Lady Arden (then The Honourable Mrs Justice Arden, DBE). This led to the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999, which significantly reformed the law of contract in England & Wales and Northern Ireland by providing for a statutory exception to the common law doctrines of privity and (indirectly) consideration. [4] He was then appointed as the Norton Rose Professor of Commercial Law at St Hugh's College, Oxford. In 2007 he was appointed as a Deputy High Court judge, sitting part-time in the Commercial Court, having previously sat part-time as a Recorder in both criminal and civil cases. [5] He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2007. [6] In 2010, he was appointed a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford and Professor of the Law of England, University of Oxford, which he remained until his appointment in 2020 to the Supreme Court. [7] From 2015 to 2016, he was President of The Society of Legal Scholars. In 2015 he was elected as an Honorary Fellow of Brasenose College. [8] In private practice, Burrows was a door tenant of Fountain Court Chambers, London. He has appeared in a number of court cases, and was appointed an honorary QC in 2003.
Burrows' work as an academic has proved particularly popular amongst judges, with Baroness Hale, then President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, having commented that "there are few, if any, legal scholars whose writings are more frequently cited in our courts". [9]
Burrows took up appointment as a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom on 2 June 2020, taking the judicial courtesy title of Lord Burrows. He is the second Justice (after Lord Sumption) to have been appointed without first having served as a full-time judge, and the first Justice to have been appointed directly from academia. [10]
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