Robert Wright, Baron Wright

Robert Alderson Wright, Baron Wright, GCMG, PC (15 October 1869 – 27 June 1964) was a British judge.

On 11 April 1932, he was appointed Lord of Appeal in Ordinary and was created additionally a life peer with the title Baron Wright, of Durley in the County of Wiltshire; however he resigned as Lord of Appeal in 1935. Wright became instead Master of the Rolls, a post he held until 1937, when he was made Lord of Appeal in Ordinary again. He retired in 1947.

Cases

• Rex v Wallace [1931] 23 Cr App R 32, A famous murder case, the verdict being overturned on appeal.
• Hillas & Co v Arcos [1932] UKHL 2
• The Liesbosch v The Edison (1933) ‘The law cannot take account of everything that follows a wrongful act’
• Lindsey County Council v Marshall (1936)
• Wilsons and Clyde Coal Company v English (1937) give due regard to the actual conditions under which men work in a factory or mine, at the long hours and the fatigue, to the slackening of attention which naturally comes from constant repetition of the same operation, to the noise and confusion in which the man works, to his preoccupation in what he is actually doing at the cost perhaps of some inattention to his own safety.
• Grant v Australian Knitting Mills [1936] AC 85
• With v O’Flanagan [1936] Ch 575
• Attorney-General for Canada v Attorney-General for Ontario (1937), where a panel chaired by Lord Atkin struck down the Canadian New Deal, including the federal social security system and the minimum wage, as he later admitted, Wright dissented. (At that time dissents could not be recorded publicly.) Canada then abandoned appeals to London.
• Spense v Crawford (1939)
• Lowry v Consolidated African Selection Trust Ltd [1940] AC 648, directors' duty to get best price for shares
• Southern Foundries (1926) Ltd v Shirlaw [1940] AC 701
• Luxor (Eastborne) Ltd v Cooper (1940) ‘the duty of the court is to construe such documents fairly and broadly, without being too astute or subtle in finding defects’
• Liversidge v Anderson (1941), while Atkin dissented over the suspension of habeas corpus. Wright's explanation, however, was that the Birkett committee (advising the home secretary on cases of detention under the emergency powers) provided a more effective protection than the courts, and he was perhaps right. Certainly his broad approach to statutory interpretation made him a better constitutional lawyer than his peers.
• Joseph Constantine SS Line Ltd v Imperial Smelting Corp (1941)
• Crofter Hand Woven Harris Tweed Co v Veitch [1942] AC 435, a famous statement that workers have the right to strike in support of their interests and to enagage in collective bargaining.
• Muir v. Glasgow Corporation, in which he helped clarify the principle of negligence by saying that a duty of care was was only breached if somebody did something which was "obviously and inherently dangerous": as the case revolved around a tea-urn, he made the amusing remark that "to introduce a savage animal such as a lion or tiger would be obviously and inherently dangerous, but not a tea-urn"
• Fibrosa Spolka Akcyjna v Fairbairn Lawson Combe Barbour Ltd [1943] AC 32, 61, recognising the basis of unjust enrichment. "It is clear that any civilised system of law is bound to provide remedies for cases of what has been called unjust enrichment or unjust benefit, that is to prevent a man from retaining the money of or some benefit derived from another which it is against conscience that he should keep."

Notes

References

• N Duxbury, 'Lord Wright and Innovative Traditionalism' (2009) 59 University of Toronto Law Journal 265-340.

External links

• Portraits of Robert Wright, Baron Wright at the National Portrait Gallery, London