William Dalison

Sir William Dalison (died 1559) was an English judge.

The younger son of William Dalison of Laughton, Lincolnshire, sheriff and escheator of the county, by a daughter of George Wastneys of Haddon, Nottinghamshire, he entered Gray's Inn in 1534, where he was called to the bar in 1537. He was elected reader of his Inn in 1548 and again in 1552, on one of which occasions he gave a lecture on the statute 32 Henry VIII, c. 33, concerning wrongful disseisin, which is referred to in Dyer's Reports (219 a) as a correct statement of the law. He took the degree of serjeant-at-law in 1552, receiving from his inn the sum of £5 and a pair of gloves.

In 1554 he was appointed one of the justices of the County Palatine of Lancaster. In 1556 he was appointed a justice of the King's Bench and knighted. His patent was renewed on the accession of Elizabeth (November 1558). He died in the following January, and was buried in Lincoln Cathedral.

He was MP for Lincolnshire in October 1553.

Dalison compiled a collection of cases decided during the reigns of Edward VI and Philip and Mary (Harl. MS. 5141). His so-called ‘Reports’ were published in the same volume with some by Serjeant Benloe in 1689; but the greater portion of those attributed to Dalison were decided after his death. J. H. Baker writing in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography comments that for the period 1546 to 1558 Dalison's cases are hard to separate from those of Richard Harpur.

By his wife Elizabeth, daughter of Robert Dighton of Sturton Parva, Lincolnshire, who survived him and married Sir Francis Ayscough, he had issue four sons and five daughters. His descendants settled in Kent, and were represented in the female line in the 19th century by Maximilian Hammond Dalison of Hamptons, near Tunbridge.