Sir Walter Boyd, 1st Baronet

Sir Walter Boyd, 1st Baronet, PC (Ire) (28 January 1833 – 25 June 1918) was an Irish judge, who was also a member of the Privy Council of Ireland.

After serving for many years as the Irish Bankruptcy judge, he was transferred to the King's Bench Division of the High Court of Justice in Ireland.

In politics he was a staunch Unionist: his wife's family, the Andersons, played a crucial role in maintaining British rule in Ireland in the late nineteenth century.

Maurice Healy recalls a well-known story that Mr Justice O'Brien angrily asked him: where was Dr Boyd's[2] respect for the Court?

[1] Maurice Healy thought that the office suited him well: while he was not an especially acute lawyer, he had a great deal of common sense, and a remarkable ability to detect commercial dishonesty.

[3] He had a gift for uncovering fraud; unfortunately, in Healy's view, his experience as a judge led him to assume that human beings are dishonest by nature, and although he did not lose his essential kindness or good humour, he became something of a cynic.

[1] Maurice Healy states that the universal affection and respect in which the Bar held him meant that he could always rely on the support of counsel on both sides to overcome any deficiencies in his own knowledge of the law.

[3] He was also fortunate that the quality of his judicial colleagues was very high; when he was sitting with more learned judges like Christopher Palles he would generally defer to their greater expertise.

[8] His short judgement in the probate case, Crofts v Beamish,[9] where three High Court judges were unable to agree on the proper interpretation of a will, gives a flavour of his robust prose style and forceful personality.

In 1897 his son Walter Herbert Boyd designed the Howth 17th Footer, now the oldest one-design keelboat racing class in the world.