John Francis Donaldson managed only a lower second in his law degree, and never really established himself as a legal luminary. But this did not prevent him from becoming both an extremely successful commercial practitioner and a significant and highly influential Judge, albeit that he left his judicial mark primarily in the field of procedure and administration, rather than on the black letter of the law.

Donaldson was born in London in 1920. His father, Malcolm, an eminent gynaecologist and obstetrician, was a leading innovator in the treatment of cervical cancer. Donaldson was educated at Charterhouse School and then Trinity College Cambridge. He was active in the Cambridge Union, reflecting an enjoyment of debate and public speaking. In an early indication of his political leanings, he also became President of the Federation of Conservative & Unionist Associations. The Second World War disrupted Donaldson's career plans. He was commissioned in the Royal Signals in 1941, and saw active service with the Guards Armoured Division in the campaign in North-West Europe. He ended the War as a captain, then spent a year with the military government in Allied-occupied Germany. Perhaps this helped to hone the administrative skills which he displayed during his judicial career. Demobilized in 1946 as an honorary lieutenant-colonel, Donaldson returned to London and was called to the Bar by Middle Temple in the same year.

Donaldson also picked up instructions in Patrick Devlin's Restrictive Practices Court, becoming Junior Counsel to the Registrar of Restrictive Trading Agreements in the late 1950's. Although he had chosen to make his career in a set which specialised in shipping, insurance, and international sale of goods, Donaldson acquired an early interest in industrial relations law, and contributed to a text on proposals for trade union reform. This enthusiasm for quasi-political matters saw him serve a term on Croydon Council, although accounts differ over whether he was an official Conservative or an Independent with conservative leanings. Closer to his chambers' core focus, he raised his profile as a shipping lawyer as one of the editors of the 8th - 10th editions of 'Lowndes & Rudolf On General Average'.

By 1952, Donaldson was beginning to make recurrent appearances in the law reports as junior to Megaw, Mocatta, and Roskill. By the middle of the decade, he was increasingly arguing cases in the Commercial Court on his own. He was Mocatta's junior in The 'Houston City' [1956] AC 266, a significant Privy Council decision on safe ports, and Roskill's in The 'Aello' [1961] AC 135, a misguided House of Lords decision on when a vessel was an "arrived ship" for laytime purposes. (Roskill and Donaldson won that point. A decade later, when he was a Judge, Donaldson cheerfully applied The 'Aello' in a case which came before him in the Commercial Court. But a differently-constituted House of Lords decided that he and Roskill had been wrong in The ‘Aello’ after all, and overruled the earlier decision: The 'Johanna Oldendorff' [1974] AC 479.) Megaw and Mocatta both led him in the landmark Suez Canal frustration case Tsakiroglou v Noblee Thorl [1962] AC 93, Megaw before Kenneth Diplock in the Commercial Court and in the Court of Appeal, and Mocatta in the House of Lords after Megaw went on the Bench early in 1961.

Donaldson, by his reaction to Megaw's departrue, unwittingly plunged 3 Essex Court into existential crisis. Reasoning that chambers plainly had sufficient work to support three QC's and that he had made a success at the junior Bar, Donaldson made a bid to acquire his former pupilmaster's practice, and applied for appointment as QC in the 1961 round. Determined not to be outdone, Michael Kerr submitted an application of his own. On an unscheduled visit to 3 Essex Court one Friday afternoon, the Lord Chancellor's Permanent Secretary effectively told Donaldson and Kerr that they could be QCs if they wanted, but, if they did, they would have to leave their set and start out on their own. The ostensible justification for this ultimatum was that the authorities had decided that it was not a good thing for any set of chambers to have more than two QCs, because that would tend to drive work towards a small number of elite sets, and stifle competition. But there was long a suspicion that this newly-invented policy was directed specifically at breaking 3 Essex's dominance at the commercial Bar. Whether the idea belonged to Lord Chancellor Kilmuir or to the Attorney-General, the obnoxious Reginald Manningham-Buller (immortalised as "Reggie" in Patrick Devlin's account of the Bodkin Adams trial) never became clear.

In the great demurrage case The 'Suisse Atlantique' [1967] 1 AC 361, Donaldson argued at the first hearing before the House of Lords that the charterers should not be permitted to raise a new argument based on fundamental breach. When he lost that point, he returned to argue the fundamental breach point at a second hearing after a two month adjournment, and won. Maintaining his industrial relations sideline, he also appeared in a number of employment cases. He even managed to get involved tax litigation, arguing a case in the Lords against two future Chancery Judges and Law Lords, John Brightman and Sydney Templeman (Cory v Inland Revenue [1965] AC 1088; Donaldson lost.) With Donaldson making such a splash as a QC and junior tenants of the calibre of Anthony Lloyd and Christopher Staughton, 3 Essex Court came through the crisis of 1961-1962 to remain a leading commercial set.

In addition to more usual types of Court work, Donaldson was a senior member of the government counsel team in the Vassall Inquiry into the activities of John Vassall, a Whitehall civil servant who spied for the Russians. Accounts do not suggest that Donaldson had any great flair as an advocate, but he had focus, concentrating his - and the Court's - attention on the central points. He also had a good reputation for personally shouldering most of the work in a case, relying on his juniors less than his contemporaries commonly did.

Donaldson's career as a commercial QC was short. In 1966, a week before his forty-sixth birthday, he was appointed to the Queen's Bench Division. Since Labour was in government, his political convictions can hardly have played a part in this early promotion. His role in the Vassal Inquiry is more likely to have been influential, just as Samuel Porter's involvement in the Budget Leaks Inquiry (albeit as Chair, rather than counsel) hastened Porter onto the Bench.

Whereas Kerr, Donaldson's near-contemporary, stuck close to the Commercial Court during his time as a first-instance Judge, Donaldson, , whose practice at the Bar had been broader, felt comfortable with a range of Queen's Bench work. Early reported cases included litigation about company law and insolvency, education, and local government. He was also relatively well prepared for the criminal trials which made up a large proportion of Circuit work, having held a part-time judicial office in criminal jurisdiction whilst at the Bar. But the Commercial Court naturally accounted for a large part of his judicial time. Donaldson was the first-instance Judge in Post Office v Norwich Union [1966] 2 Lloyd's Rep 499, a key decision on when the cause of action accrues under a liability policy. (In an early indication that Donaldson's powers of legal analysis were not necessarily profound, his decision was reversed: the Court of Appeal, sensibly enough, preferred Patrick Devlin's analysis in an earlier case.)

Other prominent commercial cases included Ulster-Swift v Taunton [1975] 2 Lloyd's Rep 502, one of the earliest authorities on the CMR Convention governing carriage by road, and Johnson Mathey v Constantine Terminals [1976] 2 Lloyd's Rep 215, a significant decision in the development of the concept of bailment on terms. Donaldson also quickly exhibited his enthusiasm for procedural innovation, issuing a Practice Note in 1966 announcing experimental changes to the system for listing Commercial Court hearing dates: [1967] 1 WLR 1545. Though he may not have been a deep legal thinker, his judgment was usually reliable, and relatively few of his reported first-instance decisions (there were close to four hundred of them) were overruled on appeal. But while he was very much at home in the Commercial Court, it was his activities in another tribunal which won him public fame (or infamy).

The Conservative government elected in 1970 was anxious to reform trade union law, a subject in which Donaldson retained an active interest. He actually had a hand in the drafting of the Industrial Relations Act 1971 which, as well as amending the substantive law, created a new institution, the National Industrial Relations Court, for the resolution of industrial disputes. The general judicial response mirrored the reaction to the Restrictive Practices Court more than a decade previously, and fears were again expressed that the Judges would be dragged into political disputes. However, just as Devlin had supported the RPC, so Donaldson was an enthusiast for the NIRC, and he made himself the natural choice as its President. But whereas Devlin's optimism had broadly been proved justified, the NIRC turned out to be every bit the poisoned chalice that Donaldson's colleagues feared. The legal press thought that "no court before or since has attracted such persistent adverse publicity". Donaldson himself attracted strident and very public personal opprobrium from the unions, Labour politicians, and left-leaning newspapers for a series of decisions which, although they dutifully applied the law as stated in the Act, were condemned by his critics as the vindictive and politically-motivated actions of a Conservative lackey.

The Civil Division of the Court of Appeal in 1982 was enmired in managerial crisis. Denning a talismanic leader for two decades, had adopted a management style which mixed the lax with the despotic. His approach to hearings was relaxed. At pains to ensure that justice was done - and seen to be done - in every case, he fostered a culture in which parties were permitted to exhaust every point. There were usually no time-limits for hearings: counsel were allowed to run on until they ran out of things to say. And Denning, who was something of a traditionalist, had not been particularly interested in innovations to promote efficiency. So all hearings, no matter how major or minor, were generally still heard by three Lords Justices, which stretched the Court's limited numbers thin. Submissions were almost exclusive oral, with virtually no materials provided to the Judges to read in advance. Judgments were usually delivered orally too: even reserved judgments which had been prepared in writing were formally read out in open Court. The losses of time and judicial resources which these ways of working delays which this engendered inevitably made it difficult for the Court to get through its workload to timetable. Denning's response to the problem showed his steelier side: he loaded his Judges with a relentless succession of appeals, leaving them insufficient time between hearings for proper preparation of reserved judgments. Denning himself retained an irrepressible mental enegry until his last day in office. But, by the time he retired, many of the Lords Justices felt tired out, and the Court had acquired a significant backlog of outstanding appeals.

Donaldson, who had exhibited strong managerial control in the Industrial Relations Court and the Commercial Court, was selected for his perceived ability to get a grip on the situation. He was responsible for a series of radical reforms, some of which significantly changed the shape of litigation in the English Courts: the appointment of a Registrar of Civil Appeals, to take over responsibility for various administrative matters; the deployment of a single Lord Justice, rather than a full panel of three, to decide pre-hearing applications; the increased use of two-Judge Courts for full appeal hearings; and reserved judgments handed-down in writing, rather than read out in open Court. Donaldson also chivvied recently-retired Lords Justices to sit part-time as "retreads", boosting the number of available Judges. Donaldson's former pupil master, John Megaw, sat on nearly three hundred reported appeals in retirement; his old professional rival, Michael Kerr, on the best part of a hundred.

Of more profound significance than any of these, Donaldson first encouraged, then made compulsory, the use of Skeleton Arguments, written documents summarising each party's case, read by the Court before the hearing. This initiative, which was soon adopted in the Commercial Court and then in other jurisdictions, began a significant shift towards written advocacy in English litigation. Many applications which would once have been dealt with orally in Court are today disposed of on the basis of written submissions. The shift towards paper started by Skeleton gathered further momentum when written witness statements replaced the traditional process of oral evidence-in-chief. The inevitable consequence of more and more written material being placed before the Court was that the time allowed for oral submissions became shorter. The open-ended trials and appeals of olden times before have today been replaced with hearings of fixed duration, governed by regimented timetables and the imposition of guillotines. The system which Donaldson the Judge wrought is one which Donaldson the practitioner would scarcely have recognised, though there are the beginnings of indications that some Judges believe that the retreat from oral advocacy has gone too far.

In 1945, Donaldson married Dorothy Mary Warwick, a nurse who had cared for his mother during treatment at London's Middlesex Hospital. Dorothy later became a prominent cancer charity campaitner, and was the first female Lord Mayor of London in the 1980's (she refused to be called "Lady Mayoress", on the basis that "Lord Mayor" was the name of the office for which she had run). They had three children, and shared a love of sailing (Lymington, for which Donaldson took his House of Lords title, lies on the Solent, a major sailing centre). Donaldson's other principal pastime was DIY. It is reasonably certain that he could produce a cupboard or a set of shelves faster than any Commercial Judge before or since.

Dorothy died in 2003. John Donaldson died of a heart attack, at home in Lymington, in August 2005.