The Squire Law Library and the Faculty of Law are pleased to announce that an entry for David Eryl Corbet Yale has been added to the Eminent Scholars Archive.
David Yale was born in Southsea, near Portsmouth in 1928, where his father was stationed as an army officer. David spent much of his childhood at Porthmadog, where he attended primary school, before boarding at Malvern College during most of the war years. He gained an open scholarship to Queens' College in 1947, and in 1950 switched to Christ’s for his LLB. David was offered an assistant lectureship in 1952, and stayed at Christ’s for the rest of his career, rising to Reader in English Legal History in 1969. He retired in 1992, and he and his wife Ann returned to his family home in Porthmadog on the edge of Snowdonia, where he was interviewed for ESA in November 2019.
During his long service at Christ’s, David established himself as an authority on 16-17th century English law, especially the development of Equity and Admiralty law, through his meticulous transcriptions and interpretation of the writings of Lord Nottingham, William Fleetwood and Matthew Hale. David discusses various aspects of this work during the interviews.
His conversations include wartime recollections as a schoolboy, and adds to ESA's rich Faculty record of the immediate post-war years. David recounts his experiences as an undergraduate and an academic as the university recovered from chronic shortages of staff and facilities. Over his career, he played an active role in the running of his college and faculty, and the conversations include recollections of his toiling selflessly at the administrative coalface.