On the 11th and 12th of June 2009, the University of Edinburgh hosted a conference and public lecture in honour of Sir Gerald Gordon CBE QC LLD.

Sir Gerald has been one of the most influential figures in Scottish criminal law and procedure in the last century. He was Professor of Scots Law at Edinburgh University from 1972 until 1976. His work The Criminal Law of Scotland, one of the first volumes to be published in the prestigious Scottish Universities Law Institute series in 1967, is now in its third edition and is regarded as the leading source on Scots criminal law by the courts (where it is frequently cited) and academics alike. Sir Gerald is the editor of the Scottish Criminal Case Reports and of Renton and Brown’s Criminal Procedure According to the Law of Scotland. He was a sheriff from 1976 to 1999 and a temporary High Court Judge until 2004. He was a member of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission from its inception in 1999 until 2009. He was knighted in 1999, having previously been made a CBE, and was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2002. The Society currently has only 67 honorary fellows (“persons eminently distinguished in any subject within the disciplinary domains of the Society”), and Sir Gerald is believed to be the only lawyer to hold this distinction.

The costs of the conference and public lecture were generously covered by support from the Clark Foundation for Legal Education, W. Green and the Scottish Universities Law Institute. The events were organised jointly by the University of Edinburgh and the University of Glasgow.

• The conference took place on Thursday 11th and Friday 12th June in the Raeburn Room of Old College. Further details, including copies of some of the papers, can be accessed on this website (see the links in the menu bar on the right-hand side of the page).

• The lecture was delivered by Lord Hope of Craighead. You can listen to it via the Law School's "Blogs and Podcasts" page.

Enquiries about any of these events should be directed to james.chalmers@ed.ac.uk.

The conference proceedings will be published as a Festschrift volume in 2010 as part of the Edinburgh Studies in Law series.