Lord Goff of Chieveley
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The Right Honourable The Lord Goff of Chieveley PC FBA |
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The Lord Goff of Chieveley when an appellate judge
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| Senior Lord of Appeal in Ordinary | |
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In office 1 October 1996 – 30 September 1998 |
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| Monarch | Elizabeth II |
| Preceded by | The Lord Keith of Kinkel |
| Succeeded by | The Lord Browne-Wilkinson |
| Lord of Appeal in Ordinary | |
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In office 6 February 1986 – 30 September 1998 |
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| Succeeded by | The Lord Hobhouse of Woodborough |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
Robert Lionel Archibald Goff 12 November 1926 Kinloch, Perthshire, Scotland |
| Died | 14 August 2016 (aged 89) Cambridge, England |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | University of Oxford |
| Occupation | Judge |
| Profession | Barrister |
Robert Lionel Archibald Goff, Baron Goff of Chieveley, PC, FBA (12 November 1926 – 14 August 2016) was a British judge and law lord.
In his obituary, The Telegraph referred to the "unbroken series of successes" in his "glittering legal career".
Goff was born and raised in Perthshire. From an early age he had a love of Scottish reeling, for which his mother acquainted him with the local farmers. His father, an Army Officer, planned a military career for the young Robert but that was not ultimately to be.
Educated at St Aubyn's School Rottingdean and Eton College, he left in 1944 to spend the next four years in his father's regiment, the Scots Guards, where he grew a trademark military moustache. He went up to New College, Oxford after the war, where he took a first class honours degree in Jurisprudence.
In 1951 he was called to the Bar at Inner Temple, but remained at Oxford as a tutor and fellow for Lincoln College. He bought a typewriter and began recording his wartime experiences in legal terms. It was twenty years before The Law of Restitution, a massive tome, finally appeared in print in 1966. The analysis was a focus on repairing the damage of war in Europe through the philosophical metaphor of contract law. Making and breaking deals and bargains had brought Europe into conflicts of interest, collapsing the normal juridical process of trial and testing the validity of contracts and the remedies for restoring equity. The work broke new ground on the equitable doctrine of restitution and was widely used by City lawyers, judges and barristers alike. With Gareth Jones, a Cambridge law professor, they explored the doctrine of "unjust enrichment", greatly expanding the conceptual meaning of equity in civil cases to encompass rectification of wrongs done by commercial entreprises, profoundly impacting the expansion of city institutions, for it touched on areas like insurance, pensions and fiduciary duties. It also had impacts on the criminal law of fraud.
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