Alan Rodger was born on 18 September 1944 in Glasgow, to Professor T Ferguson Rodger, Professor of Psychological Medicine at the University of Glasgow, and Jean Margaret Smith Chalmers, and educated at the private Kelvinside Academy in the city.

[1][2] He was an Advocate Depute from 1985 to 1988 and was appointed Solicitor General for Scotland in 1989, being promoted to Lord Advocate in 1992, and was created a life peer as Baron Rodger of Earlsferry, of Earlsferry in the District of North East Fife on 29 April 1992,[3] and was appointed to the Privy Council.

[5] Lord Rodger of Earlsferry died from a brain tumour at a hospice in Clydebank on 26 June 2011, at the age of 66.

He was President of the Holdsworth Club in 1998–99 and made an Honorary Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers in 2008.

He received honorary degrees of Doctor of Laws (LLD) from the Universities of Glasgow (1995), Aberdeen (1999) and Edinburgh (2001).