William Markby
Sir
William Markby (
1829-
1914) was an
English judge and legal writer, the fourth son of the Rev. William Henry Markby, rector of
Duxford, St. Peters. He was born at
Duxford,
Cambridge.
He was educated at
Bury St. Edmunds and
Merton College,
Oxford, where he took his degree in
1850. In 1850 he was called to the bar, and in
1865 he became recorder of
Buckingham. In
1866, Markby went to
India as judge of the High Court of
Calcutta. This post he held for twelve years, and on his retirement was appointed Reader in Indian Law at Oxford.
He was a member of the Commission to inquire into the administration of justice at
Trinidad and Tobago. Besides
Lectures on Indian Law, he wrote
Elements of Law considered with reference to the General Principles of Jurisprudence. The latter, being intended in the first place for Indian students, calls attention to many difficulties in the definition and application of legal conceptions which are usually passed over in textbooks, and it ranks as one of the few books on the
philosophy of law which are both useful to beginners and profitable to teachers and thinkers.
In
1897 appeared
The Indian Evidence A Ct, with Notes. Sir William Markby also contributed to the law magazines, articles on
Law and Fact, German Jurists and Roman Law, Legal Fictions, etc., several of which are embodied in the later editions of the
Elements. He was made
D.C.L. of Oxford in 1879, and
K.C.I.E. in 1889.
