BIOGRAPHY

Richard Oerton was born in Devon in 1936. He was admitted as a Solicitor in 1959 and got married in the same year. He worked in private practice, then in legal publishing. After that he spent 13 years at the Law Commission, where he wrote discussion papers, consultation papers and reports dealing with law reform and was concerned in the drafting of legislation. He spent a short while in the Treasury Solicitor's Department before moving back into private practice and ending as consultant with a firm of Solicitors and Parliamentary Agents in Westminster.

He has long been interested in penal reform and was once Book Review Editor of the Howard Journal (the journal of the Howard League for Penal Reform). He has written or edited a few legal textbooks, written two other books (Who is the Criminal? and A Lament for the Law Commission) and contributed a large number of articles and letters to legal and other journals and newspapers.

He has two surviving children and five grandchildren. He’s now retired, a widower, and living in Somerset, where he has turned his attention first to a subject – that of “free will” – which has preoccupied him, on and off, since the age of fourteen, and produced two books about it. More recently, in Go, go, go, Said the Bird, he has widened his field of fire to encompass other aspects of human existence which he sees as characterised by our failure to face unwelcome truths.