Sir John William Salmond, KC (3 December 1862 - 19 September 1924) was a legal scholar, public servant and judge in New Zealand.
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Salmond was born in North Shields, Northumberland, England, in 1862, the eldest son of William Salmond (d. 1917), a Presbyterian minister and professor. His family emigrated to Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1876 where he attended Otago Boys' High School (1876–79). Salmond graduated from the University of Otago in 1882 with a B.A. degree and later an M.A. He then obtained a Gilchrist scholarship to study at University College, London, where he graduated in law and became a fellow.
Returning to New Zealand in 1887, he was admitted as a barrister and solicitor of the Supreme Court, and practised in Temuka in the South Island. In 1897 he was appointed professor of law at the University of Adelaide, South Australia, and in 1906 he returned to New Zealand to take up the founding chair in law at Victoria University College, Wellington. In 1907 Salmond was appointed as Counsel to the Law Drafting Office where he remained for four years, until his appointment in 1911 as Solicitor-General. He was made a King's Counsel in 1912, knighted in 1918 and appointed a judge of the Supreme Court of New Zealand (now known as the High Court) in 1920.
Salmond represented New Zealand at the Washington Naval Conference from November 1921 to February 1922. Upon his return to New Zealand he resumed his judicial duties but died, following a heart attack, in Wellington on 19 September 1924.
Salmond married Anne Bryham Guthrie (1861?-1941), daughter of James Guthrie of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, in 1891 in Dunedin. They had two sons and a daughter, of whom the eldest, Capt. William Guthrie Salmond, was killed in action in France in July 1918.
He was the author of several legal texts:
Two of these in particular, Salmond on Jurisprudence and Salmond on Torts, are regarded as legal classics.
The Law Library at the University of Adelaide Law School is named in his honor.[4]