Lord Devlin; Ex-Judge, Critic of Legal System

Patrick Arthur Devlin, 86, who as a judge soared through the ranks of Britain’s judiciary only to leave the bench and become a sharp critic of the legal system. Lord Devlin in 1948 became the youngest British judge to be appointed in this century when at 42 he was named to the High Court. In 1960, he was promoted to lord justice in the appeals courts. A year later he was given a life peerage and took his place in the House of Lords, where he served as a law lord. The Law Lords is the final appellate body in Britain. In 1964, Devlin quit the judiciary to the amazement of the legal Establishment. He said later he resigned because he found appeal work “so utterly boring,” and never regretted the decision. In his retirement he became a leading campaigner for the release of the Guildford Four, three men and a woman wrongly sentenced to life for two 1974 Irish Republican Army bombings. The four won their appeals in 1989, and Devlin urged an overhaul of the appeal system that would include an independent tribunal to investigate questionable cases. Devlin also served five years as chairman of the Press Council, a body that once governed newspaper behavior. In Pewsey, England, on Aug. 9.