William Rodolph Cornish CMG QC (Hon) FBA (9 August 1937 – 8 January 2022) was an Australian legal scholar and academic who was based in the United Kingdom.
Born in South Australia on 9 August 1937,[1] Cornish graduated with a law degree at the University of Adelaide in 1960 and then came to England to carry out postgraduate study; he completed a Bachelor of Civil Law degree at the University of Oxford, graduating in 1962.
[2] In 1962, Cornish was appointed Lecturer in Law at the London School of Economics (LSE) and was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn the following year.
In 1995 was appointed Herchel Smith Professor of Intellectual Property Law and served in that chair until retiring in 2004.
He was also President of Magdalene College from 1998 to 2001 and Director of the Centre for European Legal Studies in the university's Faculty of Law from 1991 to 1994.