C. H. S. Fifoot
British legal scholar (1899–1975)
Cecil Herbert Stuart Fifoot FBA (1899 – 31 January 1975) was a British legal scholar. A fellow of Hertford College, Oxford, from 1924 to 1959, he was known for his works on English legal history and for his textbook on English contract law, commonly known as Cheshire and Fifoot's Law of Contract, now in its seventeenth edition.
Life and career
Cecil Fifoot was born in Penarth, near Cardiff, the son of Sydney Fifoot, manager of the Great Western Colliery Company, and of Maria Trevor. He was educated at Berkhamsted School, before being commissioned into the Royal Field Artillery in 1917, aged 18. He was sent with a mortar unit to France, where he was injured in July 1918, leaving him partially deaf, and spent the rest of the war in hospital.
In 1919, Fifoot entered Exeter College, Oxford, with the original intent to study history before switching to jurisprudence. He studied under Geoffrey Cheshire, with whom he later co-authored an influential work on the law of contract. Fifoot took first-class honours in Jurisprudence in 1921 and was called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1922. He began to practice in South Wales, before giving up legal practice in 1924 and accepting a tutorial fellowship at Hertford College, Oxford, where he remained a fellow until his retirement 1959. Among his students were Carl Albert and Sir Ian Brownlie.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q23989527. VIAF identifies the subject as 108557348. The Library of Congress control number is n81029067. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1899, 1975, 1924 and 1959.
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This entry incorporates text from “C. H. S. Fifoot” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.