‘Lady Chatterley’ lawyer Jeremy Hutchinson, who helped change laws and attitudes on sex, dies at 102

Reporting from London —  Jeremy Hutchinson, a towering legal figure who helped liberalize British laws and world attitudes about sex and freedom of expression, has died. He was 102.

Hutchinson’s former law firm, Three Raymond Buildings, said he died Monday. No cause of death was given.

In 1960 he was part of the team that successfully defended Penguin Books against obscenity charges for publishing D.H. Lawrence’s novel “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.” The case was considered a watershed obscenity trial

The book was first published in Italy in 1928, but was banned in its full uncensored form in Britain until Penguin published it in 1960. A heavily censored version of the book was published in the United States in 1928.

The novel scandalized some with its explicit description of sex and its use of words then deemed unprintable.

During the trial, a prosecution lawyer infamously asked in court whether it was “a book that you would ... wish your wife or your servants to read?”

Hutchinson felt that attitude was out of touch with an increasingly liberal and egalitarian society, and the jury proved him right.

The laywer also fought to have as many female jurors as possible because, he later said, “women are so much more sensible about sex.”

He went on to fight in court on behalf of the erotic novel “Fanny Hill,” the explicit movie “Last Tango in Paris” and the academic book “The Mouth and Oral Sex.”

In 1982 he defended the director of the play “The Romans In Britain” accused of gross indecency.

Other clients included model Christine Keeler, a key figure in the 1963 sex-and-espionage scandal known as the Profumo Affair; Soviet spy George Blake; and drug smuggler Howard Marks.

Born in 1915 to parents who were part of London’s literary Bloomsbury group, Hutchinson attended Oxford University and served in the Royal Navy during World War II, surviving the torpedoing of his ship, the destroyer Kelly, during the Battle of Crete.

After the war he became a criminal lawyer and was made a member of the House of Lords in 1978 as Baron Hutchinson of Lullington.

Hutchinson was married to the actress Peggy Ashcroft from 1940 until their divorce in 1966; she died in 1991. In 1966 he married June Osborn, who died in 2006. He is survived by a son and a daughter.