John Vinelott
Sir John Evelyn Vincent Vinelott (15 October 1923 – 22 May 2006) was a leading
Chancery Division
from 1978 to 1994.
Biography
He was born in
School of Oriental and African Studies to learn Japanese, and served on destroyers in the Far East, reading Japanese signals. He bought a copy of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in Colombo, which made him determined to study philosophy
after the war.
He returned to his studies at
poker before storming out; others that he merely used the poker as an example in his argument. The incident has been written about in, for example, Wittgenstein's Poker
.
Vinelott obtained a
Attorney General
to prevent a public wrong.
He declined an appointment to the
Pepper v. Hart in 1989, and various points in the Derby v. Weldon
ligitagion in 1989 to 1991 .
He was not advanced to higher office before his retirement in 1994, but subsequently sat as a deputy judge of the High Court and the
Court of Appeal
until 1998.
References
- "Sir John Vinelott (Obituary)". The Daily Telegraph. London. 15 June 2006. Archived from the original on 25 September 2012.
- "Sir John Vinelott: Unflappable silk who as a High Court judge brought a philosopher's acumen to the intricacies of Chancery practice (Obituary)". The Times. London. 22 June 2006. Archived from the original on 4 June 2011.