James Munby (OW 1966)

27 July 1948 – 1 January 2026

The Waynflete Office has been informed by Martin Bowley (1955) of the death of James Munby at the age of 77. We are grateful for this obituary provided by Richard Sear (1997) who hosted a dinner in celebration of James’s retirement in 2018.

Sir James Munby was one of the most gifted English lawyers of his generation. He hadFollowing a distinguished career at the Chancery Bar (appointed to silk in 1988); known both for his expertise in company law and his work for the Official Solicitor on behalf of vulnerable adults and children. Among many other cases of note at the Bar, he appeared in the House of Lords in the case of Anthony Bland, who had been left in a persistent vegetative state by the Hillsborough disaster.

Sir James turned occasionally in practice to the financial work of the Family Division (known, until recently, as ancillary relief – it being financial relief ancillary to a divorce): in a case called Dart in 1996, he argued with prescience – albeit without, on that occasion, success – that on divorce a wife should be entitled to share in her husband’s fortune. That proposition was only established in 2000 (can it have been so recent?) in White, effectively the second time the legislation was considered by the House of Lords. Sir James had appeared the previous year in Piglowska, the first such case.

In 2000, he was appointed to the High Court Bench: it was to the enduring benefit of family law that he was assigned to the Family Division. He could have risen to the very top of any of the three divisions of the High Court. During nine years on the High Court bench, his output was prodigious: almost 300 reported judgments. Some judges are good writers and some are good jurists: Sir James was both.

Sir James served as Chairman of the Law Commission between 2009 and 2012. He was then appointed President of the Family Division: he issued a further 251 judgments as President and achieved much more besides. It is no hyperbole to state that he rescued the rushed creation of the unified Family Court from many of the problems and inconsistencies of its enabling legislation. In 2017, he created a specialist Financial Remedies Court to replace the ancillary relief jurisdiction: this writer (a practitioner within its precincts) can attest to its resounding success. He was a superb leader of the Family Division.

In retirement, Sir James continued to chair the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory, to sit and to intervene decisively on matters to do with family justice.

One of the many important areas on which the Law Commission worked and reported during his time was level crossings. The railways were a lifelong passion for Sir James: editions of The Lily published during his time at MCS record his ‘infectious enthusiasm’ as Secretary of the Railway Society. His father was a Fellow of Nuffield College and University Reader in the Economics and Organisation of Transport. On his retirement as President in 2018 (upon reaching the compulsory judicial retirement age of 70), fellow judges and court staff commandeered an engine of the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway for the day and renamed it ‘The Flying Munby’.