Sir John Eardley Wilmot PC SL (16 August 1709 – 5 February 1792), was an English judge, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas from 1766 to 1771.

He then went to Westminster School and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he matriculated in 1727,[2] before studying law in London at the Inner Temple, as his father and older brother had done before him, and was called to the bar in 1732.

[1] Bishop John Hough of Worcester wrote to Wilmot's aunt on 4 May 1737:[1] I hear every body speak of your nephew Wilmot, as one of the most hopeful young gentlemen at the Bar... he may, without presumption aspire to any thing in the course of his profession; and has no small encouragement from what he has seen, since his acquaintance with Westminster-hall, in four or five of the long Robe, who have reached the top in the prime of their years.He joined the Midland Circuit and was an advocate at the Derby Assizes.

[1] Blackstone wrote to him on 22 February 1766, after the publication of the first volume of the Commentaries: "Sir, Lord Mansfield did me the honour to inform me, that both you and himself had been so obliging as to mark out a few of the many errors, which I am sensible are to be met with in the Book which I lately published.

[1] Portraits of Wilmot include one by Joshua Reynolds, later engraved by Francesco Bartolozzi,[13] another by Dance now at the Thomas Coram Foundation for Children, with a copy in the Royal Courts of Justice, and a third attributed to Joseph Wright of Derby, now in the Inner Temple.