Lord Mustill once observed that ‘some of the most penetrating legal minds, both on and off the bench, have directed themselves to the evolution of patent law’ (Genentech Inc's Patent [1989] RPC147, 258). He put this down to the fact that ‘the industrial revolution happened where and when it did’, or, putting the matter another way, the tendency for brains to follow money. Bill Cornish's contribution to the development of patent law (and intellectual property law generally) certainly supports the first proposition, although (academic salaries being what they are) I am not sure that it supports the second. At any rate, whatever the motivation, he has been one of the small band of brilliant academic intellectual property lawyers who have made the subject a fascinating and demanding branch of study.

Bill's contribution has been remarkable not only for the penetration on which Lord Mustill remarked, for the breadth of his learning (demonstrating that a taste for the history of the subject is never a disadvantage in understanding the present law), and for its easy lucidity, but also for the wry irony (one can almost see the slight lift of the Australian eyebrows) which permeates the work and makes it such fun to read. Occasionally one feels that a concession to academic propriety has driven him to decide that the better jokes should be kept in the footnotes and not allowed to break out into the text, but one way or another solemnity is kept at bay.