Gopal Sri Ram

Gopal Sri Ram (16 August 1943 – 29 January 2023) was a Malaysian judge of the Federal Court, a senior lawyer, and a distinguished constitutional jurist. He was the first practising lawyer in Malaysia to be appointed directly to the Court of Appeal when the court was first established in 1994. He was in active practice almost purely as an advocate until his elevation on 17 September 1994.

Sri Ram had a distinguished career at the Bar and appeared in several leading cases covering a wide area of law. Many of these cases are reported in the Malayan Law Journal, some of which have introduced new principles into the Malaysian common law. He wrote about 800 judgments while sitting in the Court of Appeal and Federal Court between 1994 and 2010. He was also leading the prosecution in Najib Razak's 25 charges of abuse of power and money laundering over alleged 1MDB funds amounting to RM2.28 billion deposited into his AmBank accounts. His father was awarded the MBE and OBE for his work. His brother, Datuk Gopal Ayer Sreenevasan, was a pioneering Malaysian surgeon and instrumental in the development of the medical services in Malaysia. and had two sons, one of whom is a practising lawyer.

His father, Datuk Gopal Ayer who was an Assistant Commissioner for Labour, was the only non-British to have been conferred a Member of the British Empire by King George VI.

In 2023, Sri Ram's family donated more than 10,000 books and law journals worth about RM 9 million to the University of Malaya law faculty library. The collection is named as 'The Personal Collection of the late Justice Datuk Seri Gopal Sri Ram donated by Datin Seri Chandra Sri Ram to the University of Malaya in memory of the world renowned Librarian and Information Scientist, Dr S. R. Ranganathan .'