Garry Runciman, 3rd Viscount Runciman of Doxford

Walter Garrison Runciman, 3rd Viscount Runciman of Doxford (10 November 1934 – 10 December 2020), usually known informally as Garry Runciman, He inherited the viscountcy on the death of his father in 1989.

Career Runciman joined the faculty of Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1950s as a historical sociologist and became a junior research fellow after submitting a thesis entitled Plato's Later Epistemology. In the 1960s he became primarily a sociologist.

In 1958, Runciman received a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship (Harkness Fellowship) to study philosophy and sociology at Harvard University, Columbia University, and University of California, Berkeley. He held honorary degrees from King's College London and the Universities of Edinburgh, Oxford, and York. He was also an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an Honorary Bencher of Inner Temple. He was elected to the British Academy in 1975 and served as its president from 2001 to 2005. Runciman was also an honorary fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford.

Runciman chaired the British Government's Royal Commission on Criminal Justice, established in 1991 and which continued Sir John May's inquiry into the convictions of the Maguire Seven and encompassed further miscarriages of justice. It reported to parliament in 1993. As a result, the Criminal Appeal Act 1995 established the Criminal Cases Review Commission as an executive Non-Departmental Public Body. Runciman sat for a subsequent by-election to the Lords in 2010 to fill the Crossbench hereditary seat vacancy following the death of Lord Colville of Culross; the House seat went to the Earl of Clancarty.

Publications Runciman's first major publication was Relative Deprivation and Social Justice: a Study of Attitudes to Social Inequality in Twentieth-Century Britain. Since then, he has published A Critique of Max Weber's Philosophy of Social Science, A Treatise on Social Theory, and The Social Animal. They had three children:

Hon. Lisa Runciman (born 18 August 1965) David Walter Runciman, 4th Viscount Runciman of Doxford (born 1 March 1967) Hon. Catherine Runciman (born 18 July 1969)

Runciman died on 10 December 2020. His heir, the 4th Viscount, is a political scientist and writer who teaches at Cambridge University as a Professor of Politics.

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