On Denning - may I tender my attempt at a contemporary legal history of the man's importance, from the New Oxford Companion to Law (2008).
Joshua

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Denning Alfred Thompson  Lord Denning (1899-1999) was the most renowned English judge of the twentieth century. His fame rested on an irresistible combination of qualities. He had a quick forensic and analytical mind. He was a master of precedent and could wield the case law creatively to justify the policies and results he favoured. He was a marvellous stylist whose short, simple sentences and folksy cadences veiled a sophisticated legal mind. He expressed himself with enormous sympathy for the common people in times when class deference was more prevalent and lawyers tended to social elitism. He would confidently push beyond hampering precedents in order to bring the law into line with modern values, to clarify muddled rules, or to correct individual injustices. He was pragmatic and adventurous in applying the policy of statutes during the burgeoning era of post-war legislation. One of his greatest achievements was to help develop judicial controls for wrongful exercise of public powers in the 1960s. Perhaps the /leitmotif/ of his career was a strong aversion to arrogant abuse of power whether by big business, government or labour. He was thus seen by the legal profession and the general public as a defender of the vulnerable individual in modern mass society. Whenever a ‘settled rule’ of the law seemed unjust to Denning, he would research the legal roots of the doctrine and begin storing ideas of how the contending precedents could be used to reach more practical or just solutions. His famous decision in Central London Property Trust Ltd v High Trees House Ltd (1947), allowing a serious promise that had been relied upon to shift rights in the absence of fresh payment, was a case in point. Denning revived the obscure equitable doctrine of promissory estoppel in order to outmanoeuvre the common law rule that no promise could be enforced without a separate consideration. Shortly afterwards he identified the potential of the law of negligence to give a remedy for economic harms caused by misstatements outside contract. In a dramatic case in public law, he held that ministers would not be allowed to keep evidence from court based on an assertion of executive privilege (public interest immunity) without the court testing this claim. Not all his judicial innovations worked; his theory that unfair terms cutting back contractual remedies were themselves cancelled when a contract was breached, was never accepted; and his invention of an equitable test of factual unfairness, allowing the cancellation of contracts based on shared mistakes, never made sense and eventually was overruled. His attempts to reallocate property in failed marriages so as to protect ‘deserted wives’ introduced unwanted uncertainty into property law and also was not followed. Denning accepted such casualties as the price of creativity. His critics argued that he grasped for a power to legislate from the bench and unnecessarily unsettled the law. Denning dominated the Court of Appeal which he headed as Master of the Rolls for many decades. He resigned from judicial office in 1982 following controversy caused by his statements about the lack of impartiality of jurors from immigrant communities. But despite the undercurrents of legal and political controversy, Denning’s towering judicial achievements across the gamut of English law stand undiminished. It is impossible to imagine the common law of our time with his contributions subtracted.


JG