W. C. J. Meredith

In 1935, he married Marie-Berthe-Louise-Francoise, daughter of Louis de Lotbiniere-Harwood. They were the parents of one son, but divorced 14 November 1949. Privately, he was an amateur radio enthusiast who enjoyed tennis and skiing and had in his early years been a member of the Montreal Hunt. He died in 1960 in Montreal, and is buried at Mount Royal Cemetery. The Meredith Memorial Lectures at McGill University are named in his memory.

William Campbell James Meredith QC (1904–1960), often referred to as W. C. J. Meredith, was a Canadian lawyer, the author of three legal books, and Dean of the McGill University Faculty of Law (1950–1960). In 1951, he was noted for the prescient hiring of John Cobb Cooper to head up the new department he created, McGill’s Institute of Air Space Law.

Meredith was born on February 6, 1904, in Montreal, Quebec, the only son of Frederick Edmund Meredith and Anne Madeleine VanKoughnet. The jurist William Collis Meredith was his grandfather. He was educated in England at Summer Fields School; Wellington College, Berkshire; and, Trinity College, Cambridge. He also studied for a year at the University of Grenoble in France. Considered an expert in litigation, he became a senior partner in his father’s law firm and was made a King’s Counsel in 1942. He was selected by the government to be the special federal prosecutor at the trial of Fred Rose. He was governor of Selwyn House School and Bishop’s University. In 1950, John Wilson McConnell, Governor of McGill University, persuaded him to take up the position of Dean at Law at McGill. He held this position until his death.