Sir William James Lynton Blair (born 31 March 1950), styled The Hon. Mr Justice Blair, is a English judge. He was previously a Queen's Counsel, specialising in domestic and international banking and finance law. His younger brother is the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.[1]
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Blair was born in Scotland to Leo Charles Lynton Blair, a barrister and later a lecturer in law, and Hazel Corscadden. Like his brother Tony, the future Prime Minister, he was educated at the independent Choristers School in Durham and Fettes College in Edinburgh, before studying Jurisprudence (Law) at Balliol College, Oxford, graduating in 1971 with a Bachelor of Arts (BA). He was a contemporary at Oxford of Christopher Hitchens, Robert Jackson, William Waldegrave, Edwina Currie, Stephen Milligan, John Scarlett, John Redwood, Bill Clinton and Gyles Brandreth.[2] He was called to the Bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1972.
Blair took Silk in 1994, becoming a Queen's Counsel (QC) and was appointed a Recorder in 1998. He became a Deputy High Court Judge in 2003 and was in the same year admitted as a Barrister of the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court in the Territory of the Virgin Islands.
On 4 February 2008 it was announced that the Queen had approved his appointment as a High Court Judge, assigned to the Queen's Bench Division.[3] He was sworn in on 28 February.[4]
He is Visiting Professor of Law at the London School of Economics (since 1994) and at the Centre for Commercial Law Studies, Queen Mary, University of London (since 1999). He has also been, since 1999, an Honorary Fellow of the Society for Advanced Legal Studies (1997), and an academic adviser to the Asian Institute of International Financial Law.
From 2001 to 2008 he served, part-time, as a Chairman of the Financial Services and Markets Tribunal (Finsmat) and from 2003 to 2005 he was Chairman of the Commercial Bar Association (Combar). He was also Chairman of the International Monetary Law Committee of the International Law Association (2004) and of the Qatar Financial Centre Appeals Body (2006).
Along with Lord Woolf of Barnes, the former Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, he served as the Co-Convener of the inaugural Qatar Law Forum of Global Leaders in Law, held in Doha, Qatar, from 29–31 May 2009.
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