The Green Bag Volume XXII
September, 1910
Number 9
The Right Hon. Christopher Palles, Lord Chief Baron of Exchequer in Ireland OME years ago Mr. Justice Gran tham was on circuit in Liverpool, and happening to have some leisure
crossed to Dublin and visited the Four Courts there. This English judge might have learned something from Irish wit and wisdom. He however wrote a letter to the Times, not to express his admira tion for his learned brethren, but his
surprise at their having so little to do. Comment is unnecessary. Ireland is not a commercial country, and the legal business of all Ireland is small in amount when compared with the legal business of London alone. It is not the amount of Irish litigation, but the intellectual
output of bench and bar in Ireland, which is so remarkable. Great as have been the services of Ireland to the British Army, those services have been excelled by her services to English law as administered both in England and Ireland. Lord Russell of Killowen, the late LordChief Justice of England, began
his career as a solicitor in Belfast. The late Lord FitzGibbon (the friend of Lord Randolph Churchill), an Irish
and Shaw. Three of them are Irish men, and if Lord Loreburn is a Scotch man, as Lord Shaw undoubtedly is, Eng
land is unrepresented in its final court of appeal. Lord Collins, late Master of the Rolls in England, is the son of an Irish K. C. Lord Macnaghten is generally recognized as the judge whose law and whose lan guage are equally sound and clear. Although Lord Macnaghten is descended from Sir Alexander Macnaghten, who
fell fighting for James IV of Scotland on the field of Flodden, his family has since become Irish, and he is an Antrim
man. Lord Atkinson was a member of the Irish bar, and an Irish M. P. before he
became a Lord of Appeal. It is not, however, with these eminent Irishmen that the present article deals, but with
another Irish lawyer, who is the greatest judge that has ever sat in an Irish court of justice. Where two or three Irish lawyers are gathered together, and any question arises as to who is the greatest living
judge, was one of the wisest and wittest
Irish legal luminary, there can be no
of men. The House of Lords (as final court of appeal) is composed of the
vdoubt as to the name that will unani
Lord High Chancellor (Lord Loreburn) and of four Lords of Appeal in Ordinary, — Lords Macnaghten, Atkinson, Collins
mously be given. It will that of the Right Hon. Christopher Palles, Lord Chief Baron of Exchequer in Ireland since 1874. Prior to his appointment
