Professor John Murray, Lord Dervaird (1935 – 2015)

It is with great sadness that Edinburgh Law School notes the death of Professor John Murray, Lord Dervaird.

Ian Murray (as he was always known) was a renowned international authority on commercial law and especially on arbitration. He read Greats at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, before graduating from the University of Edinburgh with an LLB in 1962.

Called to the bar in 1962, Professor Murray was a practising advocate and QC, a part-time Scottish Law Commissioner (1977-88), and then a judge of the Court of Session where he took the judicial title of Lord Dervaird (1988-9).

He joined the University of Edinburgh’s Faculty of Law in 1990. He held the Dickson Minto Chair of Commercial Law until 1999 and was Dean of the Faculty of Law from 1994 to 1996. On retiring in 1999 he was appointed Emeritus Professor, and continued to have much influence on arbitration law as an arbitrator and counsel in numerous international arbitration proceedings and as a member of the board of a number of organisations both national and international.

Professor George Gretton commented that;

"All who knew Ian Murray remember not only his remarkable knowledge of the law, especially in the commercial area, but also his inexhaustible and wonderfully-told stories about legal figures and legal cases."

Professor Murray died on 23 December and is survived by his wife Jane and his three sons. Our thoughts are with his family at this difficult time.