He started to read English at Goldsmiths, University of London, but his studies were interrupted by Second World War.
He enlisted with the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve before he graduated: the master-at-arms told him that hyphenated surname ("Vine-Lott") were not used on the lower decks.
He bought a copy of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in Colombo, which made him determined to study philosophy after the war.
He appeared in court through most of 1976 in the long-running case of Tito v. Waddell, on the rights of Banaban landowners on Ocean Island in the Pacific, and before the House of Lords in 1977 in Gouriet v. Union of Post Office Workers, on the ability of a private individual to force the Attorney General to prevent a public wrong.
He gave the first-instance decisions in the tax cases of Conservative and Unionist Central Office v Burrell in 1980, Furniss v. Dawson in 1981, and Pepper v. Hart in 1989, and various points in the Derby v. Weldon ligitagion in 1989 to 1991 .