Lawrence Collins

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Sir Lawrence Antony Collins PC (born 7 May 1941), styled The Rt Hon. Lord Justice Lawrence Collins, is an English judge. He was formerly a partner in the English law firm Herbert Smith.

Collins studied at the City of London School, and then at Downing College, Cambridge, graduating with a starred first in Law and received an LL.M. from Columbia Law School in New York. He has been a Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge, since 1975, and became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1994. He is a member of the Institut de droit international. He has been the general editor of Dicey & Morris, the standard reference work on conflict of laws, since 1987, and it was retitled Dicey, Morris and Collins in its 14th edition, published in 2006.^[1] He is also the author of many other books and articles on private international law.

As a solicitor-advocate, he appeared before the English Court of Appeal, the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords, and the European Court of Justice. He acted for Government of Chile in the case to extradite General Pinochet.

He and Arthur Marriott (then at Wilmer Cutler & Pickering, later Debevoise & Plimpton) were the two first practising solicitors to be appointed Queen's Counsel, on 27 March 1997, and he sat as a deputy High Court judge from 1997. On 28 September 2000, he became the first solicitor to be appointed as a judge of the High Court of England and Wales direct from private practive, and only the second solicitor to be appointed to the High Court bench after Sir Michael Sachs in 1993, who had previously sat as a circuit judge for 9 years.^[2]^[3] He was assigned to the Chancery Division. He became a Bencher of the Inner Temple in 2001.

In a landmark case in 2006, he required file sharers who had refused to settle with the British Phonographic Industry to pay damages running into thousands of pounds.^[4]

His appointment as a Lord Justice of Appeal was announced on 11 January 2007 and one month later, he was sworn to the Privy Council ^[5]. He is the first solicitor to be appointed to this level of the English judiciary.^[6]