Laurence Byrne
Sir Lawrence Austin Byrne (17 September 1896 – 1 November 1965), also known as Laurence Byrne, was a
R v Penguin Books Ltd. in 1960, the prosecution of Penguin Books under the Obscene Publications Act 1959 for the publication of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover
.
Biography
Byrne was born into a wealthy Irish Catholic family at Cronybyrne House (Croneybyrne House), near Rathdrum, County Wicklow. He served as a lieutenant in the
Queen's Royal West Surrey Regiment
in the First World War. He married in 1928.
He was
Attorney General Sir Hartley Shawcross and Gerald Howard, he was one of three barrister for the prosecution in the trial of William Joyce
(Lord Haw-Haw) in 1945.
He became
Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division before moving to the King's Bench Division in 1947. In the case of R v Clarke in 1949, he held that a man who was judicially separated from his wife could be guilty of raping his wife, as an exception to a common law rule that was not overturned until the R v R
case in 1991.
The Penguin Books case was the last at which Byrne presided. He retired in 1960 and lived in Enniskerry in Ireland before moving to Essex in 1964, where he died at Gosfield Hall.
References
- Archive of the Catholic Herald for 5 November 1965
- Obituary, The Times, 2 November 1965, page 12, Issue 56468