It is with great sadness that we announce the death of our former colleague Leonard Leigh.
Leonard was born in Canada in 1935, and graduated from the University of Alberta. After several years practising law in Alberta and working for the Canadian Department of Justice, he moved to London and became a doctoral student at the School in 1962, going on to become a lecturer two years later, and Professor of Criminal Law in 1982 – a position which he held until 1997, when he left academic life to take up an appointment at the newly established Criminal Cases Review Commission.
Leonard’s scholarship ranged widely: he wrote on police powers and comparative criminal procedure as well as substantive law, publishing important work on strict and vicarious liability and economic crime. His monograph, The Criminal Liability of Corporations in English Law (1969), was groundbreaking in putting corporate liability at the heart of criminal law scholarship. In 1992, with Lucia Zedner, he wrote an important report on the administration of criminal justice in the pre-trial phase in France and Germany for the Runciman Royal Commission on Criminal Justice, set up in the wake of a number of devastating miscarriages of justice. The Runciman Commission’s final report led to the establishment of the Criminal Cases Review Commission by the Criminal Appeal Act 1995. It was in every way appropriate that Leonard should serve as one of its first cohort of members.
Meticulous and dedicated, he was modest, friendly and mild-mannered, and this, along with his keen intellect and his seemingly never-ending enthusiasm and energy, made him not only a valuable commissioner but also an effective advocate for the Commission, writing widely to publicise and explain its work. After his retirement from the Commission in 2005, he continued to publish regularly, remaining an Honorary Fellow in the Faculty of Law at the University of Birmingham until 2010. We will remember him with great affection at LSE Law School.