While not as spectacular as the bushy eyebrows of his fellow law lord Lord Griffiths, Robert Goff’s prominent moustache marked him as the epitome of the old-fashioned, upper-class gent. Indeed, the peer was described in one newspaper as having second world war movie hero looks coupled with brains.
Goff, who has died aged 89, sat on many of the biggest cases of the past 30 years, including the government’s efforts to ban the sale of the memoirs of the former MI5 agent Peter Wright in his book Spycatcher, litigation resulting from the Hillsborough disaster, and the extradition of the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
He was ennobled as Lord Goff of Chieveley on his appointment as a law lord, a lord of appeal in ordinary, in 1986, and he was the senior law lord from 1996 until his retirement in 1998.
Ever forward-looking, he took the view that the law lords had greater freedom than the rest of the judiciary to “mould and remould the authorities to ensure that practical justice is done within the framework of principle”, and was particularly keen that they should deliver individual judgments rather than a joint one, believing this would lead to the further development of the law.
In 1998 he dissented from the judgment of most of his fellow law lords that police officers could not sue for trauma suffered in the Hillsborough tragedy.
He was also not afraid to extend the sometimes limited boundaries of the law by considering doctrines of other jurisdictions. In 1995, borrowing from German law, he held that a solicitor who had failed to draw up a will before his client died owed a duty of care to the proposed but then disappointed beneficiaries.
He came out of retirement in 1999 to be part of a seven-man court to hear the former Chilean dictator General Pinochet’s appeal against extradition to Spain on charges of crimes against humanity. Holding that Pinochet was entitled to immunity, Goff was the only judge to dissent from the ruling that Pinochet could be extradited. The majority decision was eventually overturned by the then home secretary, Jack Straw.
Deceptively laid back, essentially kind and courteous to advocates and all who came across him, throughout his life he was a lover of all things Scottish.Born in Perthshire, the son of Lt Col Lionel Goff and Isobel (nee Denroche-Smith), he developed a love of reeling at an early age and could be found leading the dancing both at society balls and in local village halls. Robert was educated at Eton and his father wished his son to then have a military career, but he opted for law. He served in the Scots Guards for four years from 1944 before completing his education at New College, Oxford, where he gained a first in jurisprudence.
He was called to the bar in 1951, joining Inner Temple, and became a member of Sir Ashton Roskill’s chambers in 1956. However, he had not immediately left Oxford. He became a fellow and tutor at Lincoln College, where, with Professor Gareth Jones, he began to write The Law of Restitution, developing the hitherto rather sneered-upon concept of “unjust enrichment”. It became the leading textbook on the doctrine.
When he did finally enter chambers, his practice was almost exclusively a commercial one, with a leaning towards admiralty work. In 1969 he successfully appeared for the industrialist Sir Bernard Docker, who had sold his yacht to the property developer Harry Hyams. The latter had paid a deposit and then tried to serve a notice alleging £100,000 of defects in the boat. Goff was able to show the defects had amounted to a mere £100 and had been immediately rectified.
He was appointed a recorder in 1974, and the next year a high court judge sitting in the Queen’s bench division. In 1977 he ruled that it was unlawful to expel Taiwan from the International Badminton Association as a political expedient to allow China to be admitted. The decision allowed Taiwanese women to play in the Uber Cup, the women’s world championship, in 1978. The same year, he ruled that “carrying away” is sufficient to sustain a charge of kidnapping. The kidnapper did not now have to reach his or her intended destination, as had previously been thought.
In 1989 Goff ruled that it would be lawful for doctors to carry out a sterilisation of a 36-year-old woman with a serious mental disability who was incapable of giving her consent. In 1993 this doctrine was extended. Anthony Bland, who was in a permanent vegetative state following the Hillsborough disaster, was the first patient under English law to be allowed to die through the withdrawal of life-prolonging treatment.
Goff became a lord justice of appeal and a member of the privy council in 1982. That year he was part of the court that ruled there need be no new inquest into the New Cross fire that had killed 13 young black people at a party. The open verdict had been challenged on the basis that the coroner had tape-recorded the proceedings rather than making handwritten notes. Many years later a second inquest was held, which also returned an open verdict. In 1983 he held that the deliberate sniffing of a gluestick before driving was sufficient to warrant a conviction under the Road Traffic Act.
In 1987 he was a member of the judicial committee of the House of Lords when, in a judgment that anticipated the present-day celebrity injunctions, it was held to be pointless to grant or continue an injunction when the information the plaintiff wished to prevent becoming public knowledge was already in the public domain. In Spycatcher, Wright had charted his life in MI5, and named a former director general as a Russian agent. It was an allegation hotly and officially denied. The book had been on sale in Scotland and abroad, and copies were not confiscated when they were brought into England. “In my opinion, artificially to restrict the readership of a widely accessible book in this way is unacceptable if the information is in the public domain,” Goff wrote.
Among other positions out of court, Goff was chairman of the Council of Legal Education (1976-82), chairman of the court of London University (1986-91), and chair of the Pegasus Scholarship Trust (1987-2001), a programme that allowed the interchange of young American and English attorneys and barristers.
He regularly participated in House of Lords debates as a crossbencher. In 1999 he was awarded the Grand Cross (First Class) of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for his contribution to British awareness of German law. That year also saw the publication of The Search for Principle: Essays in Honour of Lord Goff of Chieveley.
Away from the law, his love of and talent for music, particularly Mozart, enabled him to arrange classical pieces for his children, Katherine, Thomas and Juliet, to play.
In 1953 he married Sarah Cousins. She survives him, along with their children. Another son, William, died in infancy.
• Robert Lionel Archibald Goff, Lord Goff of Chieveley, judge, born 12 November 1926; died 14 August 2016
