VIVIAN LAVAN:VIVIAN LAVAN, who has died, was a judge of the High Court and former president of the Law Reform Commission.
On the occasion of his retirement last May the then chief justice, John L Murray, spoke of his 21 years of “remarkable and important public service” on the High Court bench. President of the High Court Mr Justice Nicholas Kearns said that his great asset had always been his “humanity, sense of humour and his empathy with the frailties of others”.
Attorney General Máire Whelan described him as a “pivotal figure in the development of Irish law”.
Born in 1944, he was the son of Bertie and Sadie Lavan (née McCabe), Elphin Street, Boyle, Co Roscommon and was educated at Cistercian College, Roscrea, where Dom Eugene Boylan was an inspirational teacher.
A visit to the Four Courts when he was 15 convinced him that his future lay in the law. He subsequently graduated from UCD law school and King’s Inns and was called to the Bar in July 1969. Notwithstanding the student radicalism of the 1960s he remained a pragmatist. But he saw the need for reform. After attending a conference on legal aid at Trinity College he, together with David Byrne, Ian Candy and Denis McCullough founded the free legal aid centres in 1969.
The group’s ultimate objective was to influence the government into a comprehensive plan that afforded civil legal aid to those who needed it. In the interim, the group provided legal representation and advice to the public.
After spending some time working in Chicago, he was called to the English Bar in 1975 and to the Inner Bar in 1982.
Interested in family law, in 1976 he appeared as counsel in a case that helped lay the basis for the numerous family law statutes that were enacted thereafter.
In 1982 he was nominated to the High Court by the outgoing Haughey government. But when it transpired that there was no vacancy to be filled the nomination was withdrawn. As counsel he was heavily involved in the development of arbitration in Ireland, and served on a number of international agencies related to the area.
He was appointed to the High Court in 1989. In 1996 he presided over the trial of triple-killer Brendan O’Donnell, the longest criminal trial in Irish legal history.
In 1997 he was assigned as the sitting judge for the High Court family law division.
In a landmark judgment on Army hearing disability cases delivered in 1998, he laid down a compensation marker of £1,500 per one percentage loss of hearing.
He was appointed president of the Law Reform Commission in 1998 and held the position until 2000 when he returned to the High Court. He headed the Boundary Review Commission which made changes to European Parliament constituencies in 2003 and also redrew Dáil constituencies in 2004.He also served as Irish delegate to the European Association of Judges.
Lavan had a long association with the US legal system and was a member of the American Bar Association and International Academy of Trial Lawyers. In 1998 as jurist-in-residence at Syracuse University, New York, he lectured on Ireland and the European court.
In 1980 he was one of more than 100 lawyers who signed a declaration calling for prisoner-of-war status for members of the South African liberation movement captured by the apartheid authorities.
His wife Una, sons Myles and Vivian and daughters Naomi and Sarah survive him.
Vivian Lavan: born 1944; died August 13th, 2011