Edward Law, 1st Baron Ellenborough, (16 November 1750 – 13 December 1818), was an English judge. After serving as a member of parliament and Attorney General, he became Lord Chief Justice. Early life Law was born at Great Salkeld, in Cumberland, of which place his father, Edmund Law (1703–1787), afterwards Bishop of Carlisle, was at the time rector. His mother was Mary Christian, daughter of John Christan of Ewanrigg, Cumberland. Educated at the Charterhouse and at Peterhouse, Cambridge, he passed as third wrangler, and was soon afterwards elected to a fellowship at Trinity. In spite of his father's strong wish that he should take holy orders, he chose the legal profession, and on quitting the university was entered at Lincoln's Inn. Career After spending five years as a special pleader under the bar, he was called to the bar in 1780. He chose the northern circuit, and in a very short time obtained a lucrative practice and a high reputation. In 1787 he was appointed principal counsel for Warren Hastings in the celebrated impeachment trial before the House of Lords, and the ability with which he conducted the defence was universally recognised. He was made a King's Counsel that year. In 1798, he was made a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. He had begun his political career as a Whig, but, like many others, he saw in the French Revolution a reason for changing sides, and became a supporter of Pitt. On the formation of the Addington ministry in 1801, he was appointed Attorney General and shortly afterwards was returned to the House of Commons as Member of Parliament for Newtown in the Isle of Wight. He was knighted in the same year. In 1802 he succeeded Lord Kenyon as Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench. On being raised to the bench he was created Baron Ellenborough, of Ellenborough, in the County in Cumberland, taken from the village where his maternal ancestors had long held a small patrimony. In 1803, he presided over the treason trial of Colonel Edward Despard. In denying the jury's motion for clemency (following the character witness of Vice-Admiral Nelson) Lord Ellenborough emphasised the revolutionary nature of Despard's purpose. It was, he claimed, not only to rend the new union between Great Britain and Ireland, but also to affect "the forcible reduction to one common level of all the advantages of property,