Sir Robert Edgar Megarry, PC, FBA (1 June 1910 – 11 October 2006) was an eminent British lawyer and judge.
He did not concentrate on his academic studies at university, writing for the student newspaper Varsity as its first music critic, playing football and tennis for his college, and obtaining a pilot's licence; he ended up with a third class degree.
Megarry was also highly regarded as a legal scholar, publishing numerous articles in the Law Quarterly Review, of which he was an assistant editor.
The judge directed the jury to acquit Megarry, on the grounds that the error was a genuine mistake with no intention to defraud the tax authorities.
Megarry was appointed as a High Court judge in 1967, assigned to the Chancery Division, and received the customary knighthood.
In Midland Cold Storage v Steer[2] he denounced picketing by dock workers as "the law of the jungle", but held that he had no jurisdiction to ban it, deferring to the National Industrial Relations Court.
He was the first Chancery judge to sit outside London, when he attended a mock funeral in Iken in Suffolk to test how easy it would be to carry a coffin along an alleged right of way in St Edmundsbury and Ipswich Diocesan Board of Finance v Clark.
In 1977, he declined to grant The Beatles an injunction to prohibit the sale of an unauthorised record based on informal and unrehearsed tapes.
In 1979, he upheld a worldwide playing ban imposed on George Best by FIFA arising from a complaint by Best's former employer, Fulham Football Club.
Megarry ordered Granada Television to disclose the name of a confidential source in 1980, following leaks of information from British Steel Corporation.
In the first case, Cowan v Scargill[7] he declined a request from the National Coal Board for a mandatory order to direct union representative how to act as trustees of a pension fund, but gave directions on the representatives' fiduciary duties instead, saying that in his opinion the trustees were obliged to consider investment outside the UK and in industries that compete with coal.
In 2014, The Green Bag published a "rump" chapter, titled "Contempt," that Megarry had written but not readied for publication before his death, and had entrusted to renowned legal lexicographer Bryan A. Garner to see into print.
He was a member of the panel of judges of the Privy Council that decided the important negligence case of Yuen Kun Yeu in 1987.