Edward Pearce, Baron Pearce

Pearce was born in Sidcup in Kent, the elder son of John William Ernest Pearce, a headmaster, and Irene Pearce, née Chaplin. He was educated at Charterhouse School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, taking a First in classical honour moderations and a Third in literae humaniores. He was elected an honorary fellow of Corpus Christi in 1950.

Called to the bar by Lincoln's Inn and the Middle Temple in 1925, he practiced in the King's Bench and Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Divisions of the High Court, and was appointed King's Counsel in 1945. He became deputy chairman of the East Sussex Quarter Sessions in 1947, was elected a bencher of Lincoln's Inn in 1948 and served as its Treasurer in 1966.

Early in his career, Pearce was forced to leave legal practice because of tuberculosis. He spent some time in Switzerland, where he acquired an interest in oil painting, before returning to the Bar. He later exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy, sometimes exhibiting together with his wife, a watercolourist. He became a member of the Royal Society of British Artists in 1940.

In 1948, Pearce was appointed a High Court judge, receiving the customary knighthood. He was initially assigned to the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division, before being transferred to the Queen's Bench Division in 1954. He was made a Lord Justice of Appeal in 1957, and sworn of the Privy Council. On 19 April 1962, Pearce was made Lord of Appeal in Ordinary and was created a life peer with the title Baron Pearce, of Sweethaws in the County of Sussex.

He retired as Lord of Appeal in Ordinary in 1969, and became chairman of the Press Council until 1974. From 1969 until 1976, he was chairman of the Appeals Committee of the Takeover Panel.

In 1971–22, he chaired a commission (known as the Pearce Commission) tasked with testing the acceptability of a proposed constitutional settlement in Rhodesia negotiated between Sir Alec Douglas-Home and Ian Smith. (In 1968, Pearce had been the lone dissenter in the Privy Council in the case of Madzimbamuto v Lardner-Burke). The four-person commission reported in May 1972: it described white, coloured and Asian Rhodesians as in favour of the terms by 98%, 97% and 96% respectively, and black citizens as against them by an unspecified large majority. As a result the proposals were shelved, though not immediately abandoned.

In his later years Lord Pearce suffered from hip problems. Shortly before his death, he auctioned a sculpture, which he had acquired for £7 in 1951, at Sotheby's. The work, identified as a sculpture by Adriaen de Vries, was sold for £6.82 million.

In 1927, he married Erica Priestman (d. 1985), daughter of Bertram Priestman. They had two sons, James and Bruce, both of whom became QCs.

• McCutcheon v David MacBrayne Ltd [1964] 1 WLR 125
• Madzimbamuto v Lardner-Burke [1969] 1 AC 645
• Anisminic v Foreign Compensation Commission [1969] 2 AC 147

• Leigh Rayment's Peerage Pages
• "family.ray-jones.org.uk". Retrieved 2007-01-12.