Fittingly for a Commercial Judge, Andrew Leggatt was descended from a merchant shipowner. His great-great grandfather, George Thompson, founded the Aberdeen Line, which started out in the 1820's ferrying passengers and timber cargoes between Britain and North America, and evolved by the late 19th Century to operate a steam-powered fleet with a regular trade, including the carriage of frozen foods, between Britain and Australia. Leggatt's father, William, was a decorated Royal Navy Captain. His mother, Dorothea, was the second daughter of Admiral Sir Frederic Charles Dreyer, who oversaw the development of the Dreyer Fire Control Table (a form of early computer, for directing and controlling the big guns of the Royal Navy's capital ships) and commanded HMS 'Iron Duke', flag ship of Grand Fleet commander Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, at the Battle of Jutland in 1916.
Andrew Leggatt’s nautical forebears: George Thompson, of the Aberdeen Line (top), and Admiral Sir Frederic Dreyer, of the Royal Navy.
Born in 1930, Leggatt was too young to be called up during the Second World War, but old enough to qualify for compulsory National Service after it. So, after going to school at Eton College, he spent two years as a junior officer in the Rifle Brigade. Leggatt liked soldiering well enough to volunteer for part-time service in the Territorial Army after his compulsory term was up, and he remained a Territorial officer until 1959. But he had decided early in life that his full-time career would be as a barrister. He studied English and law at King's College, Cambridge, where he made a good student, and was awarded a scholarship. He was called to the Bar by the Inner Temple in 1954.
There was little work for very junior practitioners at the commercial Bar in the mid-1950's, and Leggatt did not begin his career as a commercial specialist. He did pupillage at 1 Harcourt Buildings (Jeremy Thorpe, the future Liberal Party leader who, decades later, was famously tried and acquitted of conspiring to murder a lover, was a fellow pupil). The set's work was a mixture of general common law litigation and crime (Sir Hartley Shawcross QC, Labour Attorney-General and principal British prosecutor at the Nuremburg War Trials, was one of the most prominent members). As it happened, Leggatt's first reported case was commercial, as junior counsel in a sale of goods action before Frederic Sellers. But he followed that with a succession of planning cases. He also developed a criminal practice, which may well have helped him to develop the impressive cross-examination skills which were widely regarded as the main strength of his advocacy.
Leggatt's early practice may have been a mixed bag, but it was nevertheless thriving. One of those early planning cases went to the House of Lords, and by the mid-1960's he was arguing cases on his own in both the Civil and Criminal side of Court of Appeal. In R v Miller & Page (1965) 49 Cr App Rep 241, for example, he persuaded the Court that, while would-be thieves who had been caught in a police sting could not be convicted of larceny (because the entrapment necessarily involved an implied consent to their taking of the goods), they were guilty of a criminal attempt.
During the late 1960's' Leggatt added restraint of trade and industrial relations cases to his repertoire. He also developed something of a niche practice in the interpretation of dock and harbour working regulations, including National Dock Labour Board v Bland [1972] AC 222, which he argued in the House of Lords while not yet Queen's Counsel. Leggatt's promotion to senior counsel came shortly after he won that case. As a QC, he raised his profile in commercial litigation, particularly in banking and financial services disputes, but also in sale of goods and shipping. But, to the end of Leggatt's time at the Bar, there was always more to his practice than Commercial Court work. As late as 1974, for example, he argued a criminal appeal in the House of Lords. The issue in DPP v Shannon [1975] AC 717 was whether one of two co-defendants could be convicted of conspiracy even if the other was acquitted: Leggatt persuaded the Lords that such a conviction was permissible. Other cases which he argued during the 1970's and early 1908's involved race relations (Charter v Race Relations Board [1973] AC 868), housing associations (Peabody v Green (1979) 38 P&CR 644), and intellectual property in cigarette brands (Imperial v Philip Morris [1982] FSR 72). Leggatt also developed a small, but occasionally headline-grabbing, entertainment practice. Most prominently, he represented Paul McCartney in litigation following the break-up of The 'Beatles'. More obviously commercial in nature, Miliangos v George Frank [1976] AC 443 resolved the question, often of great practical significance in commercial cases, of whether an English judgment could be expressed in a foreign currency: the House of Lords held that it could. The 'Chikuma' [1981] 1 WLR 314 concerned the meaning of "in cash" in a charterparty hire-payment clause, while Pao On v Lau Yiu [1980] AC 614 was an important case on economic duress. Pao On was a Privy Council appeal from Hong Kong: Leggatt's commercial practice brought him instructions in a number of Hong Kong and Singapore court cases and arbitrations.
Tall and solidly built, Leggatt had good physical presence for advocacy, and, as a practitioner, he was first and foremost a trial lawyer. But he was also interested in the life and work of the Bar outside the courtroom. As Chair of the Bar from 1981 to 1982, he promoted initiatives to encourage wider access to the profession, including the introduction of mini-pupillages, giving students short periods of work-experience within sets of chambers, and the abolition of the age-old practice of pupils paying for their training (the modern system of funded pupillages was still several years in the future).
Leggatt became a Recorder, trying criminal cases on a part-time basis, in 1974. He performed further public service as a member of the Top Salaries Review Body, helping to fix the pay of senior civil servants and Judges. In 1982, he joined the judiciary himself, as a Queen's Bench Judge. He began sitting in the Commercial Court almost at once, but got off to a shaky start: his first reported decision, Insurance Co of Africa v SCOR [1983] 1 Lloyd's Rep 541, about the interpretation of a claims co-operation clause in a reinsurance policy, was overruled in the Court of Appeal: [1985] 1 Lloyd's 312. But this proved to be a relatively rare lapse on Leggatt's part: overall, few of his reported first-instance judgments were overturned on appeal.
Leggatt in the robes of a Queen’s Bench Judge….
Among prominent commercial cases in which his decision was endorsed by the higher courts were The 'Blankenstein' [1985] 1 WLR 435, in which he held that a provision that the ultimate contracting party on one side of the bargain was "to be nominated" (a fairly common phenomenon in ship-sale and other maritime contracts) did not prevent the conclusion of an immediately binding contract; and The 'Simona' [1989] AC 788, which settled that a contracting party which elects not to accept the other party's repudiation remains bound to perform its own side of the contract in full.
In civil cases at least, Leggatt became more of a commercial specialist as a Queen's Bench Judge than he had been as a practitioner. Although he tried the occasional tort case and sat from time to time in the Administrative Court, virtually all of his reported civil cases at first-instance were in the Commercial Court. But it was criminal work which accounted for the greatest part of his time. With his criminal experience, Leggatt was regularly deployed both as trial judge in criminal cases and in the Criminal Division of the Court of Appeal, and well over half of his reported cases as a Queen's Bench Judge were in fact criminal appeals. He became a full-time member of the Court of Appeal in 1990. As a Lord Justice, Leggatt had to grapple with a variety of areas of law which were new to him, including companies and insolvency, employment, land law, landlord and tenant, tax, and even family law, as well as more familiar topics such as crime and planning. Naturally, there were some significant commercial cases among his roughly seven hundred appeals. The 'Apostolis' [1997] 2 Lloyd's Rep 241 explored the extent to which a ship may be unseaworthy because of some activity being performed on board, as opposed to the physical condition of the ship itself. In Harbour v Kansa [1993] QB 701, Leggatt emphasised the importance of the severability of arbitration clauses (a principle later given statutory recognition in the Arbitration Act 1996), and in Norjarl v Hyundai [1992] QB 863, he gave guidance on the limits of permissible conduct for arbitrators. His views on the extent of an insured's duty of good faith in The 'Star Sea' [1997] 1 Lloyd's Rep 360 were endorsed by the House of Lords ([2003] 3 1 AC 469), although in ICS v West Bromwich [1997] PNLR 166, his rather literalistic philosophy of contractual construction was rejected by the Lords rejected in favour of a contextual approach which emphasised the "factual matrix" ([1998] 1 WLR 896).
… and as a Lord Justice of Appeal.
Leggatt's efforts while on the Bar Council to modernise pupillage arrangements and widen access to the profession revealed a humane and nurturing side to his nature. But this was not an aspect of his personality which he was much inclined to reveal in Court, either while at the Bar or on the Bench. Stony-faced and acerbic, Leggatt did not enjoy a reputation as an affable Judge. Some of the more robust members of the Bar claimed to relish the challenge of enduring what they professed to recognise as a dry wit. But for more junior barristers, exposure to Leggatt's caustic judicial persona could, as The 'Times' put it, prove "a terrifying experience". (Leggatt did not direct his withering remarks only at members of the Bar. In The 'Apostolis', he condemned one of the trial Judge's key findings of fact as "ill-judged hyperbole".) The lasting physical effects of a serious leg injury, sustained when a lorry rammed his taxi shortly after he became Chair of the Bar, perhaps contributed both to his uncongenial demeanour and to his relatively early judicial retirement: Leggatt left the Bench at the age of sixty-six in 1997, after exactly fifteen years as a Judge.
But, constitutionally hard-working, he remained in more or less full-time employment for another fourteen years. Between 1998 and 2005, he sat as a member of the Board on around fifty Privy Council appeals. He was Chief Surveillance Commissioner, responsible for supervising covert information-gathering by the police and other public bodies, from 1998 to 2006. For two years, he combined that job with a review of the Tribunals system in England & Wales. Many of the recommendations in his lengthy report were adopted in the Tribunals, Courts & Enforcement Act 2007. Leggatt also chaired the Takeover Panel's Appeals Committee for five years, and practised as an arbitrator. He did not properly stop working until he was eighty.
Leggatt and his wife Gillian met while he was at Cambridge. They married in 1953, and had a son and a daughter. In his spare time, Leggatt was fond of gadgets, including luxury cars, precision watches (he wore one on each wrist), and computers (like Commercial Court contemporary Brian Neill, he was an early judicial exponent of information technology). He also enjoyed cricket, and, for less active relaxation, English literature and language (he set his children to learn new words from each day's newspaper) and listening to music. Andrew Leggatt died in February 2020, a few months after the announcement that his son George was to be made a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom.