In memoriam: William (Bill) Cornish (1937 – 2022)

I first encountered Bill Cornish in 1974 when, as a raw intellectual property doctoral student, I travelled up from Canterbury to discuss my chosen topic and seek his advice. In the 1970s, people who taught IP were almost as rare as those who studied it. We must have been a little wary of one another, since we scarcely spoke about the subject at all — me because, as a neophyte, I was unwilling to display my ignorance of it and Bill because, as I was later to discover, had so much to talk about that interested him more than straight IP. But what I did find out, in that first meeting, was how many important people he knew and how well he had assessed their usefulness to me in my chosen subject.

It was more than a decade later, in 1985, that I next encountered Bill. He was then about to succeed the legendary Professor Friedrich-Karl Beier as President of ATRIP, the Association for Advancement of Teaching and Research in Intellectual Property. It turned out that I had made sufficient of an impression for him to summon me from the wilds of Queen Mary College’s Mile End Campus in order to act as Secretary to ATRIP during his term of office. It was during Bill’s two-year presidency that I got to know him much better. I can testify that he was a pleasure to work with. His instructions to me were always brief, relevant and unambiguous. To be honest, he didn’t really need a secretariat. I often found that, by the time I came to carry out his orders, he had already performed to perfection the administrative chores with which he had tasked me.

ATRIP conferences displayed Bill at his best. Here he could share his deep understanding of IP with colleagues from around the world. A good and diplomatic listener, he gave his ear to all who sought it. Quiet and serious by nature, he was always on duty, though we all enjoyed watching him let his hair down at venues where a piano might be found; he would play though a series of exquisitely executed pieces with a verve and panache that stood in stark contrast with the solemnity of his set-piece speeches.

Curiously, Bill and I found it very difficult to discuss IP with one another because our approaches were so different. Bill made no secret of the fact that his first love was legal history, and his deployment of historical methodology was frequently apparent when he explained the evolution of legal principles from their earliest beginnings to contemporary times. My first love was the art of IP problem-solving and, while Bill was no slouch in that department, I suspect that he found it a little too trivial for his deeper thinking processes.

To end on a historical note, for very many of us the world began in 0 BC (“Before Cornish”). Before Bill, there was no-one and, before his great and magisterial book, there was nothing. Bill, we are in your debt. We shall miss you.