Thomas Edward Scrutton

The Right Honourable Sir Thomas Edward Scrutton
Sir Thomas Scrutton
King's Bench Division
Court of Appeal
Personal details
Born	28 August 1856 Poplar, London
Died	18 August 1934 Norwich
Nationality	British
Alma mater	Trinity College, Cambridge

Sir Thomas Edward Scrutton (1856–1934) was an English legal text-writer and a judge of considerable eminence.

Thomas Edward Scrutton was born in London, the son of Thomas Urquhart Scrutton, a wealthy shipowner and head of the well-known shipping firm of Scrutton and Co. He studied as a scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge, and at University College London. At Cambridge he won the Whewell Scholarship and the Yorke Prize four times, the first person to do so. He was also President of the Cambridge Union. Despite his achievements, he did not obtain a fellowship at Trinity, partly due to a feeling among some fellows that he lacked 'originality'.

He was called to the bar by the Middle Temple in 1882, and developed a busy practice in commercial cases. He became a King's Counsel in 1901 and a bencher of the Middle Temple in 1908. He was also professor of constitutional law and legal history at University College, London. In the 1886 election, he stood unsuccessfully as the Liberal candidate for Limehouse.

He wrote The Contract of Affreightment as Expressed in Charter-parties and Bills of Lading (1886), in which he was able to draw on his knowledge of the family business as well as his legal training. Over a century later, this is still the standard text, while several of his other legal works, especially that on copyright, remain useful.

He was a judge of the King's Bench Division (1910–16) and of the Court of Appeal (1916–34). He frequently sat in the Court of Appeal with Bankes and Atkin LJJ, a combination which has often been cited as one of the strongest benches ever to sit in commercial cases. On the criminal side he presided over the celebrated 1915 "Brides-in-the-Bath" trial of George Joseph Smith, and made a crucial ruling on "similar fact evidence" : Smith was charged with murdering only one of his recent brides by drowning her in the bath, but Scrutton ruled that the fact that two of his other brides had died in almost identical circumstances was admissible as evidence of a method or pattern of murder.