Colin Blackburn, Baron Blackburn

Colin Blackburn, Baron Blackburn (18 May 1813 – 8 January 1896) was a Scottish judge who sat in the English courts, became a Law Lord and is remembered as one of the greatest exponents of the common law.

He was the second son of John Blackburn of Killearn, Stirlingshire, and Rebecca, daughter of the Rev. Colin Gillies. He was born on 18 May 1813. His elder brother, Peter Blackburn, represented Stirlingshire in the conservative interest in the parliament of 1859-65. His younger brother was the mathematician Hugh Blackburn. The future judge was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, in which university he graduated B.A. (eighth wrangler) in 1835, and proceeded M.A. in 1838. In 1870, he received the honorary degree of LL.D. from the University of Edinburgh. Admitted on 20 April 1835, student at Lincoln's Inn, he migrated thence to the Inner Temple, where he was called to the bar on 23 November 1838, and elected honorary bencher on 13 April 1877.

For some years after his call, he went the northern circuit in a briefless or almost briefless condition. He had no professional connection, no turn for politics, no political interest, none of the advantages of person and address which make for success in advocacy, and though his well-earned repute as a legal author led to his occasional employment in weighty mercantile cases, he was still a stuff gownsman, and better known in the courts as a reporter than as a pleader, when on the transference of Sir William Erle from the Queen's Bench to the chief-justiceship of the common pleas, Lord Campbell startled the profession by selecting him for the vacant puisne judgeship. He was appointed justice on 27 June 1859, and on 2 November following, was invested with the coif. He was knighted on 24 April 1860. The surprise with which his advancement was received was proved by the event to have been singularly ill-founded.

It was soon apparent that the new puisne possessed in an eminent degree all the essential qualities of the judicial mind. To a logical faculty, naturally acute and improved by severe discipline, he added a depth of learning, a breadth of view, a sobriety of judgment, and an inexhaustible patience, which made his decisions as nearly as possible infallible. Few causes célèbres came before him during his seventeen-year tenure of office as judge of first instance, but the dignity and impartiality with which he presided at the trial (28 October 1867) of the Manchester Fenians were worthy of a more august occasion, and his charge to the grand jury of Middlesex (2 June 1868) on the bill of indictment against the late governor of Jamaica, Edward John Eyre, though not perhaps altogether unexceptionable, is, on the whole, a sound, weighty, and vigorous exposition of the principles applicable to the determination of a question of great delicacy and the gravest imperial consequence.

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