Professor of law and authority on family law
Born: May 6, 1948;
Died: May 12, 2018
PROFESSOR Joe Thomson, who has died aged 70, was a much respected legal academic whose textbooks came to be regarded as some of the most authoritative on private law in Scotland. His colourful and accessible style also made him popular with students, who saw him as an inspiring and entertaining teacher and above all the exact opposite of the classic stuffy professor.
Professor of law at Strathclyde University for much of the 1980s, Professor Thomson was Regius Professor of Law at Glasgow for 14 years and then an honorary professor in the School of Law. His main field of research was in the field of Scots private law, in which he published a number of textbooks.
One book in particular, Family Law in Scotland, which is now in its seventh edition, came to be seen as the definitive text on the subject. It provided a clear and comprehensive survey of Scots family law and became indispensable for students and professionals.
Born in Campbeltown and educated at Keil School in Dumbarton, Joe Thomson studied law at Edinburgh University and graduated LLB in 1970, having received the prestigious Lord President Cooper Memorial Prize for the most outstanding graduate in the subject. The same year, he took up a position as a law lecturer at Birmingham University before joining King's College, London four years later.
In 1984 he moved to Strathclyde, where he was professor of law and head of the law school and was always seen to be generous with his time and encouraging to others. Three years after joining Strathclyde, Family Law in Scotland was published, followed by other authoritative text books including Delictual Liability in 1994 and Contract Law in Scotland in 2000.
Appointed Regius Professor of Law at Glasgow University in 1991, Professor Thomson was also a deputy editor of the Stair Memorial Encyclopaedia from 1984-1996 and later director of the Scottish Universities’ Law Institute from 2000-2009, seeking – successfully – in both cases to ensure vibrant and extensive legal scholarship across the full ambit of Scots law.
He was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1996 and served as the president of the Society of Public Teachers of Law (now the Society of Legal Scholars) from 2000 until 2001, which gave him the opportunity to host the society’s annual conference in Glasgow and to welcome legal scholars from around the country in his inimitable style.
In 2000, he was appointed as a Scottish Law Commissioner – a role in which he continued to serve until 2009. He contributed to a wide range of law reform projects, particularly the commission’s extensive work on the law of succession, partly implemented by the Succession (Scotland) Act 2016. As a commissioner, he also published a number of papers on issues such as land registration and insurance contract law
He continued to produce academic work, and his innovative Scots Private Law, which aimed to provide an overview of the subject, and demonstrated his generalist ability, was published in 2006.
In his retirement, by then living in his home town of Campbeltown, Professor Thomson continued to make an active contribution to academia, serving as the editor of the Juridical Review, Scotland’s oldest law journal, until 2017, and working on new editions of his textbooks on core areas of Scots private law.
A seventh edition of Family Law in Scotland was published in 2014, and a fifth edition of his Delictual Liability the same year, while a fourth edition of Contract Law in Scotland (a collaborative effort with Hector MacQueen, in which the authors were famously ad idem aside from one specific footnote) was published in 2016. He also served as an honorary sheriff in Campbeltown until 2017.
Married to Annie Cowell in 1999, Professor Thomson had a number of gay relationships and was at the centre of some unwelcome publicity in 2000 when a former partner Alastair Murdoch claimed publicly that he was entitled to the same rights as a partner in a same-sex marriage.
On news of Professor Thomson's death, the chairman of the Scottish Law Commission, Lord Pentland paid tribute to his work as a commissioner. "He led and contributed to a great number of reform projects, including a comprehensive one on the law of succession," said Lord Pentland. "His work on these projects has made a real difference to the law of Scotland and to our society. All those who knew Joe during his time here had enormous respect and affection for him. He was highly professional with a profound understanding of the law. He was renowned also for his joie de vivre."
Professor Thomson is survived by his wife Annie.
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