The great-great-grandson of William Wilberforce, the anti-slavery campaigner, Richard Wilberforce was a law lord of liberal convictions who himself added lustre to the family name. Among his most memorable judgments were that British Rail owed a duty of care to trespassers (1972); that Granada Television must reveal the identity of a “mole” who passed on confidential documents about British Steel (1980); and that Ken Livingstone’s “Fares Fair” subsidy for the London Underground was illegal (1981). From 1971, Wilberforce was also president of the international Anti-Slavery Society.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, he and Lord Reid, the senior law lord, bestrode the world of the highest judiciary, an unrivalled duet, stimulating to any advocate appearing before them. As well as the rare combination of exceptional intellectual power and unerringly shrewd judgment of human and public affairs, both also exhibited extreme modesty and humility. The survival of the Court of Final Appeal as a third tier of the court hierarchy is due in no small measure to the confidence in the legal profession and in political circles that they inspired.

When Lord Reid retired at the beginning of 1975, Lord Wilberforce took on the mantle of shaping the law until his enforced retirement at the age of 75 in 1982. While always keen to give the law a new direction, by the application of principle and reason, Wilberforce belonged to the tradition of judicial restraint rather than indulgent activism.

Much earlier, while serving as Assistant Advocate-General on the Army legal staff, Wilberforce had been instrumental in developing a programme for the eradication of Nazism from German law and judicial procedure. He was principally responsible for the form and content of laws and edicts enacted by the Allied Supreme Commander, dissolving the Nazi Party and suspending the application of discriminatory Nazi laws. His work contributed materially to the successful occupation of Germany by Allied forces and earned him appointment as OBE and the American Bronze Star. At the end of a long and distinguished legal career, Wilberforce was to say that this had been the most constructive and rewarding period of his life.

Richard Orme Wilberforce came from a family remarkable for its intellectual quality, in which he probably had the most distinguished mind. He was the son of Samuel Wilberforce of Petworth, Sussex. The family name derives from a Yorkshire village, Wilberfoss (Wild-Boar-Foss). He was educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford, of which he later became an honorary Fellow. His academic career as a classicist and legal scholar could hardly have been more distinguished. In addition to a double first and a fellowship of All Souls in 1932, he won the Hertford and Ireland Scholarships at Oxford, and became Eldon Law Scholar on being called to the Bar by the Middle Temple. In the seven years that followed he acquired a respectable practice at the Chancery Bar at a time when competition for young men starting at the Bar was fierce.

On the outbreak of war he was commissioned into the Royal Artillery, and saw active service in Norway before being transferred to the Army legal staff, where he became Assistant Advocate-General and later served with Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces. He spent some time in the Control Office for Germany and Austria, after their surrender, where he became under-secretary.

There he met and married Yvette Lenoan, daughter of a judge of the Cour de Cassation in Paris. He returned to the Chancery Bar in 1947.

There was no rush to entrust briefs to a man who had been away from practice for seven years, and for some time Wilberforce had so little work that he contemplated leaving the Chancery Bar. But he persevered, and after a further seven years he had rebuilt his practice sufficiently to justify taking silk in 1954 at the age of 47. He was not an especially busy QC until perhaps his last year or two of practice. He was never a spectacular advocate, but his intellectual powers made him a formidable persuader. He appeared in several celebrated cases, such as the one that established the right of the Prince of Hanover to be a British subject, pursuant to an Act passed in the reign of Queen Anne; and in J. Bollinger v Costa Brava Wine Co, which stopped Spanish vintners using the description “Spanish Champagne”.

Wilberforce was also the senior author of the leading book on restrictive practices and was briefed in one of the earliest cases before the Restrictive Practices Court. During this period he was the unsuccessful Tory candidate in Hull, the ancestral constituency of William Wilberforce. His political stance would today have put him on the left of the party. He was never enamoured with Thatcherism and was profoundly pro-European.

He took an active interest in the legal side of postwar aviation, in particular the setting-up of the International Air Transport Association. He was a member of the British government team that negotiated the Warsaw Convention on International Carriage by Air, and in 1956 he was appointed CMG for services in connection with this work.

Throughout his life Wilberforce retained his interest in public international law and his links with those in this field abroad. For many years he was chairman of the executive council of the International Law Association, a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague and president of the Fédération Internationale du Droit Européen. Had Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community occurred a decade earlier, Wilberforce would have been the natural candidate for the first UK judge at the European Court of Justice. He also collected many decorations abroad and academic distinctions at home, including the chancellorship of Hull University and the visitorship of Wolfson College, Oxford.

In 1961, the year he was knighted, a number of vacancies occurred on the Chancery Bench and Wilberforce was appointed to one of them. But fact- finding was never his forte. He was quintessentially an appellate judge. The outgoing Lord Chancellor in the Conservative administration in October 1964 sensibly appointed him to the House of Lords, leap-frogging the Court of Appeal. In that year he was sworn of the Privy Council. His invariably objective approach was much more of an asset on the Bench than it had been as an advocate.

While a member of the House of Lords he was asked to preside over two tribunals to recommend fair terms for the settlement of industrial disputes, first in the electricity industry (1971) and then in the coal industry (1972). His awards brought the disputes to a close, but on each occasion he was criticised for being more liberal than the country could afford, and for setting inflationary precedents.

Wilberforce was no judicial recluse. He was comfortable discussing the works of Freud or the relationship of law and economics, but he also maintained an earthy contact with human predicaments. He played football and golf, and skied with some skill. He was a keen follower of the turf, with a considerable knowledge of the Stud Book. Unusually for a judge, he could be seen, after a day’s sitting in the High Court, in the local tea-shop off the Strand studying the form in Sporting Life. He was musical and took a great interest in opera. He was a fluent linguist and enjoyed travel. He was highly knowledgeable about the stock market and a successful manager both of his own investments and of those of All Souls.

Unassuming and a little shy, he was charming, personally warm and unusually unstuffy. But his pre-eminent quality was the refinement of his intellect, and his abiding contribution to the law was made in the House of Lords. Unlike many of his judicial brethren he welcomed the establishment of the Law Commission, which was the topic of his maiden speech in the Lords. He was to become the most active law lord of his time in legislative debates in the Upper House.

Detached but not unsympathetic, precise but not narrow, knowledgeable about the law but never afraid of innovation, quick in apprehension, and, above all, supremely clear-headed in the analysis of relevant issues, he rendered an invaluable service to English law.

He is survived by his wife, a son and daughter.

Lord Wilberforce, PC, CMG, OBE, a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, 1964-82, was born on March 11, 1907. He died on February 15, 2003, aged 95.