William Huston Dodd

William Huston Dodd (1844-17th March 1930) was an Irish politician, barrister and judge. He held the Crown office of Irish Serjeant at law, sat in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom as member for North Tyrone, and served as a judge of the High Court of Justice in Ireland from 1907-24. There is a sympathetic sketch of him in The Old Munster Circuit by Maurice Healy.

He was born in Rathfriland, County Down, the only son of Robert Dodd. He was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and Queen's University, Belfast where he took his bachelor's degree and then a master's degree. He entered the Middle Temple in 1871 and was called to the Irish Bar in 1873, becoming Queen's Counsel in 1884. In 1878 he married Ellen Hunter, daughter of Samuel Hunter of Coleraine, who died in 1916; they had no children. He was a long-standing member of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, and served as its President 1894-1896.

Dodd was throughout his adult life a loyal member of the Liberal Party, and this affected his political career, as the Liberals were in opposition during the years when he might have expected to be appointed to the Bench, although he did become Third Serjeant-at-law, which was a Crown office, in 1892. He stood for Parliament, unsuccessfully, in North Antrim in 1892 and South Londonderry in 1895. In 1906 he reached the House of Commons at last, and was made a High Court judge the following year. According to Maurice Healy, his failure to reach the Bench until he was over sixty caused a good deal of friction with his colleagues, since he had a high opinion of his own legal ability, and was unwilling to defer to the judgments of men who were considerably younger than himself.

During the transitional arrangements following the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, Dodd, like most of his colleagues, remained a High Court judge. However Hugh Kennedy, the new Chief Justice of Ireland, had an extremely low opinion of almost all of the judges of the old regime and was determined to remove them en bloc. In Dodd's case this was achieved tactfully, since the Courts of Justice Act 1924 imposed an age limit of 72, and Dodd, who was 80, was deemed to have automatically retired. He died in 1930.

Maurice Healy in his memoirs describes Dodd as a man of rough appearance and manner (his nickname was "the mechanic"), which concealed a great deal of kindness; he was rather tactless, but had the gift of being able to take a joke against himself. His main fault was vanity, and while Healy thought him a good judge, his very high estimate of his own talents was apparently not shared by his colleagues. Healy admired him for never compromising his political principles, though this delayed his elevation to the Bench by at least a decade. This led him on occasion to clash with his colleagues: according to Maurice Healy, Peter O'Brien, the Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, once reminded him pointedly in open Court that he was the junior judge (although O'Brien could fairly have pointed out that Dodd was the younger man as well). Fortunately, according to Healy, one of Dodd's virtues was magnanimity, and he was incapable of bearing a grudge.