William Rann Kennedy secured a minor place in legal history by becoming the first Judge of the Commercial Court of England & Wales actually to have been born in England or Wales. The first three Judges, James Charles Mathew, Charles Arthur Russell, and Richard Henn Collins were all Irish. But while Kennedy had an Irish-sounding surname (although he believed that his family had come to England from Scotland, moving from Ayrshire to Staffordshire in the early 1700’s), he was born in London's leafy Kensington, in March 1846. His father, William, was a vicar who had previously been a schools inspector, and the family had strong links to education: his uncle Benjamin was a distinguished classics scholar who was headmaster of Shrewsbury School for three decades; two female cousins were involved in the foundation of Newnham College, Cambridge; and his sister, Catherine became a successful headmistress, who took charge of her first school when she was only twenty-four.

The study of classics was something of a family tradition. Kennedy’s father and his uncles Benjamin, Charles, and John had all won Cambridge University’s Porson Prize, an annual award for Greek verse composition. Kennedy himself was a prize-winning classicist at Eton and at King's College Cambridge. He was also President of the Cambridge Union.

Kennedy appears to have been initially unsure which of interests, the scholarly or the forensic, he should pursue as a career. His first employment after graduation was academic, teaching the sixth year at Harrow. But the pull of the cut-and-thrust of argument and debate proved stronger, and he was called to the Bar by Lincoln’s Inn in 1871.

William Kennedy QC in 1887.

There was family precedent for this career choice. Kennedy’s uncle Charles had been a barrister in the middle of the 19th Century, and had been involved in landmark litigation which established important precedent. Unfortunately, his participation had been as an unsuccessful litigant in person, and the principle which was established in Kennedy v Broun (1863) 143 English Reports 268 was that Charles had no right to sue for his fees. Charles had been retained by Patience Swinfen, the widowed heiress to Swinfen Hall in Staffordshire, in long-running litigation about the validity of her father-in-law’s will. Patience told Charles that she could not afford to pay for his services upfront, but promised him £20,000 from the estate if he won the action for her. Charles worked on the case for years, even moving from Birmingham to London to be on hand for hearings. But when the Court eventually returned a verdict in Patience’s favour, she (or possibly the new husband whom she had married in the meantime) refused to pay Charles anything. Charles argued his own cause before the Court of Common Pleas, but in vain. Chief Justice Erle told him told that no reputable barrister would think of claiming such a “monstrous amount”, and that the contract was unenforceable on the public policy grounds that barristers had no legal entitlement to any fees: anything which grateful clients chose to pay was, in law, a mere gratuity. (Patience Swinfen was a litigious personality. She sued Frederick Thesiger, Charles’s predecessor as her barrister in the will case, for trying to settle the action without her authority. By the time her claim came to Court, Thesiger had been appointed Lord Chancellor, as Baron Chelmsford. Patience lost that case.)

Kennedy was appointed Queen's Counsel in 1885. He made the transition from junior counsel to leader successfully, with a healthy run of reported appearances in the next seven years. They included a handful of cases about tax, insolvency, and other purely financial matters: and in Allbutt v General Council Of Medical Education (1889) 23 QBD 400 he was part of the defence team in an action in which a general practitioner alleged that the Council had libeled him by finding, in disciplinary proceedings against him, that he had committed “infamous conduct”, in breach of professional rules. (The doctor’s offence had been to write and circulate ‘The Wife’s Handbook’, a pamphlet which contained advice on birth control, among other matters. The Court of Appeal held that a disciplinary decision made by the Council in good faith could not be challenged.) But most of Kennedy’s cases as a QC were shipping related. His first-instance appearances were split between the Queen’s Bench and the Admiralty, and he argued more than a dozen cases in the Court of Appeal and four in the House of Lords and Privy Council.

Although a review of Kennedy's reported cases does not really bear out suggestions that, even as leading counsel, he had little presence outside Liverpool, he did not become a pre-eminent commercial QC in the fashion of his Merseyside contemporaries Joseph Walton and John Bigham. But he raised his professional profile in 1891 with the publication of a textbook on maritime salvage. Although Kennedy himself was only responsible for the first edition (the second was published in his lifetime, but prepared by his son, Alfred), the book acquired a reputation as the authoritative text on the subject, and ultimately outlived its author.

Kennedy was an enthusiastic Liberal, and keen to play an active role in politics. He made three unsuccessful attempts to persuade voters to elect him to Parliament, in 1885, 1886, and 1892. Shortly after the last valiant but doomed effort, he was appointed a Queen's Bench Judge by the Liberal Lord Chancellor, Lord Herschell. Since Kennedy was undoubtedly a capable and successful lawyer, the appointment could hardly be called blatantly political. But, at forty-six, he was a comparatively young Judge for the time, and there was a suspicion that reward for his efforts in the Liberal cause was a factor in his early elevation (just as it may have been no coincidence that he was appointed QC in the year of his first hustings).

A 'Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper' pen-portrait praising Collins as someone who could always compensate for the inadequacies of others archly implies that Kennedy's brief tenure of service in the Commercial Court in 1895 had not been regarded as a great success. Contemporary comment on Kennedy's judicial career probably reveals why not. Although no-one doubted Kennedy's cleverness, he acquired a reputation for being, as The 'Times' sought tactfully to put it, "somewhat slow and laboured, both in the formation and in the expression of his opinions.” Indeed, it was sometimes implied that he was too clever for his own (or litigants') good, and that he was guilty of spotting phantom difficulties where none existed. A Judge who, according to The 'Law Quarterly Review', would unstintingly investigate every last point in each case, with little regard for its relative importance, was not ideally suited for the brisk and tightly-focussed service which Commercial Court litigants were accustomed to receive from J.C. Mathew. Kennedy’s reputation for struggling to arrive at a final decision sometimes made him a figure of fun. ‘Vanity Fair’ liked to give its occasional cartoon portraits of contemporary Judges titles which captured something of each judicial personality. The unkind caption for Kennedy’s portrayal read “our weakest Judge”.

Still, with Collins heading for the Court of Appeal in 1897 and Mathew beginning to reduce the amount of time which he spent in the Commercial Court, Kennedy began to sit recurrently in the Court, and became for a time one of the three principal Commercial Judges, alongside Mathew and Bigham. He duly proved more pedestrian than the other two: The 'Times' complained in 1903 when he took four months to produce a judgment, thundering that the reputation of the Commercial Court would be undermined if this sort of thing became commonplace. But Kennedy's conclusions, when he eventually arrived at them, were usually reliable. His judgment in Tyne & Blyth v Leech [1900] 2 QB 12 remains important in relation to when and to what extent a shipowner’s actions may stop the running of laytime or demurrage, while Darling v Raeburn [1906] 1 KB 572 settled a charterer’s right (in the absence of contrary provision in the contract) to the full and sole use of the ship.

Cosmopolitan in outlook (he was fluent in eight languages), Kennedy was particularly noted for an interest in international law, something which was by no means common among English Judges of the early 20th Century. He was committed to the work of the International Law Association, and was its President from 1908-1910. Kennedy was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 1909, a relatively rare distinction among the Commercial Court judiciary. The element of extra judicial perspective which this gave Kennedy was useful in a number of cases arising out of the Great War, including Continental Tyre v Daimler [1915] 1 KB 893, in which the issue was whether a company incorporated in England, but with German shareholders and directors, was an enemy alien. Faithfully applying the principle that a corporation has its own distinct legal personality, Kennedy and a majority of his colleagues in a specially-expanded Court of Appeal ruled in favour of the company. But the House of Lords, more sensitive to the national mood, reached the opposite conclusion: [1916] 2 AC 307. Of more long-term significance for commercial lawyers were Thomas v Portsea [1911] P 54, for many years the leading authority on the incorporation (or not) of charterparty arbitration clauses into bills of lading; and Leonis v Rank [1908] 1 KB 499, in which Kennedy stated the test for when a vessel becomes an arrived ship in terms which were belatedly treated as definitive by the House of Lords in The 'Johanna Oldendorff' [1974] AC 479 (after a wrong turn in The 'Aello' [1961] AC 135).

The 'Times' obituarist thought that Kennedy’s judicial merits could be expressed by a single word: "scholarly". He was modest and even-tempered as a Judge. His judgments were not showy (“no bon mots, or flights of rehtoric or style”, said The ‘Times’), and, unlike some Commercial Judges, he never acquired a reputation for rudeness. Round-faced, the younger Kennedy bears an unfortunate resemblance in bewigged photographs to Gordon Hewart, the hapless Lord Chief Justice of the 1940's. But he never attracted the contempt which Hewart brought upon himself.