Sir Christopher James Saunders French (14 October 1925 – 25 March 2003) was a British barrister and judge who sat on the High Court of Justice.
[1] He is most commonly remembered as the judge who sat on the Sellafield cancer litigation, described as "one of the longest, most complicated and most expensive civil actions ever heard before a British court.
In his book, Privacy and the Press, Joshua Rozenberg noted acidly that as French was dead he was now free to write openly about his conduct of the libel claim brought by Albert Reynolds against the Sunday Times, but then restrained himself to saying "all I shall say is that there needs to be a better way of ensuring that judges whose powers are in decline through age or illness do not carry on sitting,"[3] and noting that in the Court of Appeal Lord Justice Bingham saw the force in the criticisms made of French's conduct of the trial.
In 1986 he awarded the London Symphony Orchestra substantial damages over allegations made in Private Eye that its members were "drunk, dissolute, unruly and irresponsible".
Hon Mr Justice French also sat as the judge at first instance in Hazell v Hammersmith and Fulham LBC [1990] 2 QB 697.