Roy Goode

Sir Royston Miles "Roy" Goode QC (born April 6, 1933) is a preeminent academic commercial lawyer in the United Kingdom. Amongst many other achievements, he founded the Centre for Commercial Law Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. He was awarded the OBE in 1972 and was knighted for services to academic law in 2000.

He is a fellow of St John's College, Oxford. He was formerly the Norton Rose Professor of English law at Oxford University, and is now an Emeritus Professor of Law at the University. He was made an honorary Bencher of the Inner Temple in 1988.

Unusually for a successful academic, he spent 17 years in private practice as a solicitor before turning to academia. Even more extraordinarily, as a young man, Roy Goode had never actually attended university himself, but qualified through work experience.

Roy Goode is probably best known as the author of the leading legal textbook "Commercial Law". Other leading texts that he has written include "Legal Problems of Credit and Security", "Payment Obligations in Commercial and Financial Transactions" and "Principles of Corporate Insolvency".

He was also a member of the Crowther Committee on Consumer Credit, the Monopolies and Mergers Commission and the DTI Advisory Committee on Arbitration. He chaired the Pension Law Review Committee, which was set up following the Maxwell scandal, and which led to the Pensions Act 1995. He was previously chairman of the executive committee of JUSTICE, the all-party human rights and law reform organisation, and a member of the Governing Council of UNIDROIT. He is also known for his writings on documentary letters of credit and demand guarantees; he has called these financial instruments "abstract payment undertakings". This term, as most academic writers would agree, is Roy Goode's.

External links

* [http://www.uea.ac.uk/law/support_pages/goode.htm brief biography]