A. W. B. Simpson
Alfred William Brian Simpson, QC (Hon.), JP, FBA (17 August 1931 – 10 January 2011) usually referred to as Brian Simpson and publishing as A. W. Brian Simpson, was a British legal historian and legal philosopher. At the time of his retirement, he was Charles F. and Edith J. Clyne Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. Biography Born in Kendal, Cumbria, Simpson was the son of the Rev Canon Bernard W. Simpson and Mary Simpson. His interest in law began when he was young, as he describes attending a murder trial in Leeds when he was a boy. Simpson was educated at Lancing House in Lowestoft, Oakham School and The Queen's College, Oxford on a closed scholarship, where he took a First in Law, the best first of his year. He registered for a doctorate in 1954, but never completed it. After a year as a junior research fellow at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, he became a fellow and tutor in Law at Lincoln College, Oxford, from 1955 to 1973. He was a member of H. L. A. Hart's informal discussion group on jurisprudence, a subject he became associated with as a result. However, diffidence precluded him publishing on the subject until the end of his life. Increasingly unhappy in Oxford, Simpson began to look further afield. As a result of National Service with the Nigeria Regiment, he retained an interest in Africa, and was Dean of the Faculty of Law of the University of Ghana in 1968–69. In 1975, he left Oxford to join the University of Kent as Professor of Law, where he remained until 1983. He joined the University of Chicago Law School as Professor of Law in 1984, and the University of Michigan Law School in 1986, where he remained until retirement. He also held visiting professorships at Dalhousie University (1964), the University of Chicago (1979, 1980, 1982, 1984), the University of Michigan (1985), the University of Cambridge (Arthur Goodhart Visiting Professor in Legal Science, 1993–94) and the University of Toronto (2009). In the 1970s, Simpson was a member of the Heilbron Committee on the law of rape and the Williams Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship. In 1976 Simpson was awarded a DCL by Oxford; he received honorary degrees from the University of Ghana (Hon. DLitt, 1993), Dalhousie University (Hon. LLD, 2003) and the University of Kent (Hon LLD, 2003). He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1983 and of the American Academy of Arts and Science in 1993. In 1995 he was elected an honorary fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, and he was appointed an honorary Queen's Counsel in 2001. Scholarship A leading historian of the common law, Simpson pioneered the study of 'leading cases' which he thought "deserved the fullest possible study in their historical context". He became so identified with this approach that this type of scholarship became known as 'doing a Simpson' in some circles. According to Simpson, the idea for this approach came to