Joseph Kay QC (27 February 1821 – 9 October 1878) was an English economist and judge on the Northern Circuit.
Educated privately and at Trinity College, Cambridge, he was called to the bar at the Inner Temple in 1848.
[2] He was appointed judge of the Salford Hundred court of record in 1862 and became a member of the Portico Library in Manchester.
[3] Kay is best known for a series of works on the social condition of the poor in France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, and Austria, the materials for which he gathered on a four years tour as travelling bachelor of his university.
He was also the author of The Law relating to Shipmasters and Seamen (London, 1875) and Free Trade in Land (1879, with a memoir).