Tom Bingham, who has died aged 76 of lung cancer, was widely recognised as the greatest English judge since the second world war. Serving at the apex of the judiciary for an unusually long span, he was the first individual in the modern era to act both as master of the rolls, with the supreme remit for the civil courts for four years from 1992, and then as lord chief justice, running the criminal courts as Britain's highest-ranking judge. From 2000 until his retirement in 2008 he was the senior law lord. In that role, he wrote a number of leading judgments, defining the place of individual rights in the landscape of a changing British constitution, melding the relationship between long-established principles of common law with the more recent obligations of European and international laws. His lectures and writings, and in particular his last book, The Rule of Law, published at the start of this year, are treated as seminal texts.