John Naish

John Naish, PC (Ire), QC (15 August 1841 – 17 August 1890) was an Irish lawyer and judge, who held a number of senior offices, including Lord Chancellor of Ireland.

Early life Born in Limerick on 15 August 1841, son of Carroll Naish of Ballycullen and his second wife Anne Margaret Carroll or O'Carroll, Naish was educated at Clongowes Wood School and Trinity College Dublin. He was an outstanding student, gaining numerous distinctions in mathematics, physics and natural science, as well as law. He got his BA in mathematics in 1862.

Early career He was called to the Irish Bar in 1865, and practised on the Munster Circuit, becoming a QC in 1880. His reputation as a barrister was mixed: he was considered too nervous and retiring to be a good advocate, and disliked the rough-and-tumble of Court practice but hard work and academic brilliance compensated for this. He appeared in the celebrated libel action brought by Canon O'Keeffe against Cardinal Cullen (who had placed the Canon under an interdict) and co-wrote with the future Mr. Justice Edmund Bewley an influential textbook on the Common Law Procedure Acts.

He married Maud Dease of County Westmeath and they had three children. J. Carrol Naish, the Hollywood actor, was his great nephew, the grandson of his elder half-brother Carroll Naish.

Reputation Delaney, in his biography of Christopher Palles, calls Naish an outstanding judge, even in an age when the Irish judiciary included such eminent figures as Christopher Palles himself, Gerald FitzGibbon, and Hugh Holmes. Elrington Ball, on the other hand, thought him a poor choice as Lord Chancellor: in Ball's view, Naish was a good academic lawyer but an unsuccessful barrister and a failure as a politician. As a Roman Catholic, however, he was an acceptable choice of Chancellor to Nationalists. The Dictionary of National Biography praises him as a brilliant academic, and while accepting that he had his faults as a barrister, agrees with Delaney that he was a great judge, perhaps the most eminent Irish judge of his time.