David Eady

Sir David Eady (born 24 March 1943) is a retired High Court judge in England and Wales. As a judge, he is known for having presided over many high-profile libel and privacy cases.

He was called to the bar in 1966 and became a Queen's Counsel in 1983. He was a member of One Brick Court chambers and, as a lawyer, specialised in media law until he was appointed a High Court Judge (Queen's Bench division) on 21 April 1997. As of November 2014, he continued to sit in the High Court as an additional judge.

Background

Eady was educated at the Brentwood School, Essex, and graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge.

Barrister

Eady was a member of One Brick Court chambers, "a legal chambers known for its libel work". He specialised in media law. The Daily Telegraph described him as "a leading courtroom defender of red-top journalism, much in demand as a barrister who could be relied on to uphold the freedom of the tabloids to expose the private lives of public figures."

Examples include Eady's defence of The Sun when the Coronation Street actor Bill Roache sued over taunts that he was "boring". He also represented Singapore politician Lee Kuan Yew in his libel suits against the late opposition politician Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam. Eady was unsuccessful in 1984 when he represented Derek Jameson in an action against the BBC over a critical profile of Jameson on Radio 4's Week Ending programme broadcast on 22 March 1980. Eady had advised his instructing solicitor Peter Carter-Ruck that the case was "high risk", but the advice had not been passed on to Jameson. In the late 1980s, Eady was appointed to the Calcutt Committee, presided over by David Calcutt, which considered how to police the media.