Patrick Atiyah
Legal scholar who promoted a critical approach to English law in its social and economic context
PATRICK ATIYAH, who has died aged 87, was Professor of English Law at Oxford from 1977 to 1988 and one of the most important legal scholars of his generation in the common-law world. A younger brother of the mathematician Sir Michael Atiyah, Patrick Atiyah was known to generations of law students for his classic Introduction to the Law of Contract, first published in 1961 and now in its sixth edition, an authoritative exposition which, unusually for a legal textbook, adopted a critical and argumentative approach, engaging readers in debates about the meaning and value of the law and opening up new ways of thinking about the law of obligations.
Atiyah was a founder member of the so-called “law-in-context” movement, which aims to broaden the study of law by examining it critically in its social, political and economic context. In 1970 he was the author of Accidents, Compensation and the Law, the first book in an eponymous series of studies published by Cambridge University Press.
This dealt with the law of tort, of which Atiyah was a prominent advocate for change. Tort governs the implicit civil responsibilities that people have to one another – as opposed to responsibilities set out in contracts – and which, among other things, guide the process of compensation for personal injuries.
His key criticism was of the fault principle that seeks to find the party to blame before compensating the victim, a corollary of which is that if fault cannot be attributed, there can be no attribution of liability, so a victim may not receive compensation. Thus a man might slip and break his leg on a dance floor and recover damages from the owner of the dance floor, while a child might have both legs amputated as a result of meningitis and be awarded nothing.
The thrust of the book was that the law of tort should be abolished, especially as it relates to the law on personal injuries, and should be replaced with a no-fault state compensation system similar to that established in New Zealand in the 1970s. Later, however, Atiyah changed his mind and in The Damages Lottery (1997), instead of a state run system, he suggested that people should buy personal safety insurance.
One of four children, Patrick Selim Atiyah was born on March 5 1931. His father, Edward Atiyah, was a Christian Lebanese writer who came to England to study at Oxford University, where he met and married his Scottish wife Jean (née Levens). Patrick grew up in Sudan where his father taught at the Gordon Memorial College, and Egypt, where he worked in the intelligence department of the Anglo-egyptian administration.
The family returned to Britain in 1945 and Patrick was educated at Woking County Grammar School for Boys, before going up to Magdalen College, Oxford, to read Law. He was called to the Bar by the Inner Temple in 1956.
He began his academic career as an assistant lecturer at the London School of Economics, returning to Africa as a lecturer at the University of Khartoum from 1955 to 1959, then as a crown counsel in Ghana until 1961. Back in Britain, four years as a legal assistant to the Board of Trade were followed by a fellowship at New College, Oxford.
In the early 1970s Atiyah moved to Australia as Professor of Law at the Australian National University in Canberra. He then spent four years as Professor of Law at the University of Warwick before his appointment as Professor of English Law at Oxford in 1977, with a fellowship at St John’s College. He retired in 1988 and took silk in 1989. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1978.
Notable among Atiyah’s other works were The Sale of Goods (1957), a definitive guide which ran into eight editions; Vicarious Liability in the Law of Torts (1967); The Rise and Fall of Freedom of Contract (1979), a historical survey of the development of the freedom of individuals and groups to form contracts without government restrictions, and Promises, Morals and Law (1981), a survey of the various philosophical theories of promissory obligation, which won the 1984 Swiney Prize, awarded jointly by the Royal Society of Arts with the Royal College of Physicians.
From 1981 to 1986 Atiyah was general editor of the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies. In later life he moved to Hayling Island.
In 1951 Patrick Atiyah married Christine Best, who survives him with three sons. Another son, Jeremy, a travel writer and one-time travel editor of the Independent on Sunday, died in 2006 of a heart attack while on assignment in Umbria.
Patrick Atiyah, born March 5 1931, died March 30 2018