Professor Toby Milsom, 1923-2016

Professor Stroud Francis Charles (Toby) Milsom, MA, Hon LLD, QC, FBA, Fellow of St John’s College and Emeritus Professor of Law, has died at the age of 92.

Professor Milsom became a Fellow in Law at St John’s College in 1976. Born in Merton, Surrey, he came to Cambridge in 1941 where he studied for a BA in Law at Trinity College, and received his MA in 1948.

From 1944-45 Professor Milsom worked in a research unit in Naval Intelligence, and in 1947 was called to the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn. He was awarded a Commonwealth (Harkness) Fund Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania in 1947, and then became a Prize Fellow, Fellow and Lecturer at Trinity College Cambridge until 1955, when he left Cambridge and took up the post of Lecturer at the London School of Economics where he stayed for a year. Between 1956 and 1964 he held the positions of Fellow, Tutor and Dean in New College, Oxford, after which he became Professor of Legal History at London University until 1976. It was during this period at the London School of Economics that he produced the first edition of his seminal Historical Foundations of the Common Law.

In 1976, Professor Milsom returned to Cambridge where he was elected a Fellow at St John’s, and was appointed Professor of Law at the University of Cambridge, becoming Emeritus Professor of Law at the University on his retirement in 1990.

Other prominent appointments held by Professor Milsom were Visiting Lecturer at New York University Law School several times between 1958 and 1970, Visiting Professor at Yale Law School on several occasions between 1968 and 1990, and Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School and Department of History in 1973. He was Honorary Bencher at Lincoln’s Inn in 1970, and a member of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts in 1975. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1967, and QC in 1985. He was made Honorary LLD at Glasgow in 1981, Chicago in 1985, and Cambridge in 2003.

Professor Milsom won several prizes during his career, including the 1948 Faculty of Law Yorke Prize, University of Cambridge, the Swiney Prize, Royal Society of Arts, in 1974, and the Ames Prize awarded by Harvard in 1972. His notable publications include Studies in the History of Common Law (collected papers) in 1985, Sources of English Legal History, which he co-authored with J.H Barker, and A Natural History of the Common Law in 2003, his final publication.

Professor Milsom died at the age of 92 on 24 February 2016. Funeral details will be announced in due course.