Inigo Bing

Inigo Geoffrey Bing (born 1 April 1944) is a retired judge.

Bing is the son of Maj. Geoffrey Henry Cecil Bing, CMG QC and Christian Frances Blois, daughter of Sir Ralph Barrett Macnaghten Blois, 9th Baronet.[1]

Inigo Bing's early education was at St Olave's Grammar School in Southwark. He graduated from the University of Birmingham with an LLB degree in law in 1966. He was called to the Bar by the Inner Temple in 1967.[2]

Bing was a Labour Party member of Lambeth London Borough Council between 1971 and 1978. He stood for the Social Democratic Party in the 1983 General Election and the 1987 General Election for Braintree, and came second each time to Tony Newton of the Conservative Party.[1]

Inigo Bing was a District Judge (formerly Metropolitan Stipendiary Magistrate) from 1989 to 2000. He was a Recorder from 1996 to 2000. Bing was a Circuit Judge on the South Eastern Circuit from 2000 to 2012, sitting at Snaresbrook Crown Court.[3]

Bing was elected a Bencher of the Inner Temple in 2012. He is the author of Criminal Procedure and Sentencing in the Magistrates' Court (1990).[3] In 2020 he published 'Populism on Trial' (Biteback Publishing) a polemical book about the danger of populism to the rule of law in the United Kingdom.

Bing has also, on a previous occasion, expressed concern over what he perceived to be an urge to over-legislate in the UK. He explained to his audience, at the Heritage Foundation in Washington D.C., that:[4]

'I want to suggest to you that there is a noticeable and concerning trend in Britain to fill the statute book full of new criminal laws, that such a trend is inconsistent with modern liberal values, that this trend has had a deleterious influence on the delivery of criminal justice, and that such overcriminalization is actually adversely affecting some traditional concepts of justice. In endeavoring to answer the question why there is such an appetite for over-legislation in the field of criminal law I will suggest it is, in many cases, a short-sighted and ill-thought-out way of responding to transient public opinion on particular topics.'

Personal life

In 1980, he married Shirley-Anne Holmes (née Benka). She died in 2003 and he married Judith Warwick in 2004. The marriage was dissolved and in 2019 he married Mary Honeyball, the former Labour member of the European Parliament.

References
  1. Mosley, Charles, ed. (2003). Burke's Peerage, Baronetage & Knighthood (107 ed.). Burke's Peerage & Gentry. p. 402. ISBN 0-9711966-2-1.
  2. http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/Documents/college-artslaw/law/80/80-law-guests.pdf
  3. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2014-11-11. Retrieved 2015-03-15.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  4. "The Urge to Over-Legislate: Criminal Law and Public Opinion in the United Kingdom".


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.