Edward Somers
New Zealand jurist
Sir Edward Jonathan Somers (9 September 1928 – 3 June 2002) was a New Zealand jurist and member of the Privy Council.
Biography
Somers was born in Christchurch in 1928, and was educated at Christ's College and the University of Canterbury, where he gained a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Laws. In 1952, Somers became engaged to Mollie Louise Morison, and they later married and went on to have three children.
Somers practised as a barrister and solicitor between 1952 and 1971, and solely as a barrister thereafter. In 1973, he was appointed Queen's Counsel, and the following year he became a judge of the Supreme Court (now High Court). He was appointed a judge of the Court of Appeal in 1981, a role from which he retired in 1990. In 1981, he was also appointed to the Privy Council.
Somers was a part-time lecturer at the University of Canterbury from 1954 to 1974.
In 1998, Somers was appointed by the British government to be a member of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry. He resigned from that role for personal reasons in 2000.
“Edward Somers” enters the record as new Zealand jurist. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Edward, Somers and Zealand can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Edward Somers” 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.