He was, subsequently, standing junior counsel to the Department of Trade in 1979 and a member of the Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland from 1981 to 1984 before being appointed Advocate Depute (an advocate with a right of audience in the High Court) in 1985. He was Home Advocate Depute (the senior advocate depute) from 1986 to 1988 before becoming Solicitor General for Scotland in 1989. Promoted to Lord Advocate in 1992, Rodger joined the Privy Council and was created a life peer.
Rodger never took an insular view of Scottish law, arguing that it should be prepared to adapt and learn from other jurisdictions. Highly regarded as an international jurist, he was said to be the only British law officer to have taken part in proceedings before the International Court of Justice, the European Court of Justice, the European Court of Human Rights and the European Commission of Human Rights.
Rodger was an innovative Lord Advocate, allowing the cameras in to record court proceedings and presiding over the introduction of the right of the prosecution in Scottish courts to appeal against sentences it considered too lenient. He also initiated a wide-ranging review of the criminal justice system, to look for cost savings.
There was some controversy in 1995 when Rodger was appointed a Senator of the College of Justice, a judge of the High Court of Justiciary and Court of Session, as, in effect, he had nominated himself to the bench.
After less than a year, however, he was promoted to Lord President of the Court of Session and Lord Justice-General to replace Lord Hope, who had moved to the House of Lords.
In this capacity he presided over the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law, and tackled major reviews of the law in areas such as diminished responsibility and coercion. He also campaigned to encourage his fellow judges to write clear judgments.
Rodger was appointed a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary in 2001. Along with nine other Lords of Appeal in Ordinary he became a Justice of the Supreme Court upon that body's inauguration on October 1 2009.
A modest, hard-working man with a strong moral sense, Lord Rodger was taken ill during the hearing of an appeal against the conviction of Nat Fraser, who had been found guilty of the murder of his wife by a Scottish court in 1998. Fraser, who had exhausted the appeal system in Scotland, subsequently won the appeal in the Supreme Court on the ground that Scottish courts had breached his human rights because significant evidence had been withheld at his trial.
Earlier this month, following the outcome of the Fraser case and of the Cadder case (in which the Supreme Court ruled that the Scottish courts had breached the human rights of thousands of suspects by allowing police to question them for six hours without the presence of a defence lawyer), Scotland's First Secretary Alex Salmond launched a scathing attack on the "foreign" court and its judges, accusing it of "intervening aggressively" in Scotland's independent legal system.
The First Minister focused his attack on Lord Rodger's Scottish colleague in the court, Lord Hope, questioning why he had the individual authority to overrule decisions made by, in one case, seven Scottish appeal court judges. Senior legal figures in Scotland, however, were reportedly dismayed by the personalisation of the dispute because Lord Rodger, then extremely ill, was unable to defend himself.
Rodger, who was unmarried, listed "writing" among his hobbies. His publications included Owners and Neighbours in Roman Law (assistant editor, 1972); Gloag and Henderson's Introduction to the Law of Scotland (joint editor, 10th edition, 1995); Mapping the Law (2006); and The Courts, the Church and the Constitution (2008).
Lord Rodger, who was suffering from a brain tumour, was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1991 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1992. From 2008 he was High Steward of the University of Oxford.
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