Lost Word Of The Week (87)

Lord Ellenborough, whose birthname was, by a piece of nominative determinism, Edward Law, was Lord Chief Justice from 1802 until 1817, earned a reputation for being harsh and overbearing towards counsel and sometimes showed remarkable bias against the accused in his summing ups to the jury. In a judgment that resonates today, in R v Inhabitants of Eastbourne, he ruled that destitute French refugees in England had a fundamental human right to be given sufficient means to enable them to live. In Cary v Kearsley he held that “a man may fairly adopt part of the work of another for the promotion of science…..one must not put manacles on science”, a judgment that introduced the concept of fair use into copyright law.

So synonymous was he with English law at the time, that his name was used for a bit of slang. Ellenborough’s lodge was defined in the Chester Courant of July 29, 1806 as “vulgarly denominated as the King’s Bench prison” on the north side of Borough Road in Southwark, while Ellenborough’s teeth was used to denote the spiked chevaux-de-frise that topped its walls.