William Markby

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Sir William Markby.

Sir William Markby (1829-1914) was an English judge and legal writer, the fourth son of the Rev. William Henry Markby, rector of Duxford, St. Peters. He was born at Duxford, Cambridgeshire.

He was educated at Bury St. Edmunds and Merton College, Oxford, where he took his degree in Mathematics 1850. In 1850 he was called to the bar, and in 1865 he became recorder of Buckingham. In 1866, Markby went to India as judge of the High Court of Calcutta. This post he held for twelve years, and on his retirement was appointed Reader in Indian Law at Oxford.

He was a member of the Commission to inquire into the administration of justice at Trinidad and Tobago. Besides Lectures on Indian Law, he wrote Elements of Law considered with reference to the General Principles of Jurisprudence. The latter, being intended in the first place for Indian students, calls attention to many difficulties in the definition and application of legal conceptions which are usually passed over in textbooks, and it ranks as one of the few books on the philosophy of law which are both useful to beginners and profitable to teachers and thinkers.

In 1897 appeared The Indian Evidence A Ct, with Notes. Sir William Markby also contributed to the law magazines, articles on Law and Fact, German Jurists and Roman Law, Legal Fictions, etc., several of which are embodied in the later editions of the Elements. He was made D.C.L. of Oxford in 1879, and K.C.I.E. in 1889.