Campbell, JOHN, BARON, Lord Chancellor of England, biographer of the chancellors, was born 15th September 1779 at Cupar-Fife, the third child of the parish minister. He was destined for the ministry, and passed in 1790 from Cupar grammar-school to St Andrews University, which he left in the spring of 1798 to become tutor to the son of a West India merchant in London. Having determined to follow the legal profession, Campbell joined Lincoln's Inn (1800), read for several years in the chambers of the famous Mr Tidd, during which period he also acted as reporter and dramatic critic to the Morning Chronicle, and was called to the bar in 1806. His abilities and perseverance, his readiness to assist professional brethren, and the publication of the first volume of his elaborate nisi prius 'Reports' (1808), brought him into favourable notice even on the home circuit; and by the end of 1824 he became leader of the Oxford circuit, which he had joined in 1810. In 1821 he married the eldest daughter of Mr Scarlett, afterwards Lord Abinger, who was made Baroness Stratheden in her own right in 1836, and by whom he had three sons and four daughters. He became king's counsel in 1827, and chairman of the Real Property Commission in 1828. He entered parliament in 1830 as member for Stafford, and after some hesitation accepted the Reform Bill of 1831. His real interest lay in law reform. In 1832 he was made Solicitor-general, knighted, and returned to parliament for Dudley. Upon his promotion to the Attorney-generalship in 1834, Campbell, defeated at Dudley, was returned for Edinburgh. In 1841 he became Lord Campbell, and was raised to the Lord-chancellorship of Ireland, an office which he soon resigned, on the defeat of the Melbourne ministry, honourably declining the pension to which he was legally entitled. Lord Campbell was made Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in 1846, Chief-justice of the Queen's Bench in 1850, and Lord Chancellor of England in 1859. He died on the night of 22d June 1861.
In politics Campbell was a consistent Whig. He boasted that the vote, which at some personal inconvenience he had returned from circuit to the House of Commons to give, had carried the second reading of the Reform Bill in 1831. As an advocate, Campbell was sound and industrious rather than brilliant; he was a courteous and eminently painstaking judge. As Chief-justice of the Queen's Bench he presided over the trial of Dr Newman for libel (1855), and the prosecution of William Palmer for poisoning (1856). As Lord Chancellor he delivered judgment in the cause célèbre of the Emperor of Austria v. Kossuth. Among the statutes introduced by Campbell's influence may be mentioned one limiting liability in actions of defamation (6 and 7 Vict. chap. 96); a second, which he borrowed without acknowledgment from Lord Lyttelton, enabling the representatives of persons killed by accident to recover compensation in certain cases (9 and 10 Vict. chap. 93); and a third, against obscene publications (20 and 21 Vict. chap. 87).
It is in his capacity of legal biographer that Campbell's reputation has suffered most severely. His Lives of the Chief-justices (1849-57) and of the Lord Chancellors (1845-47), though readable and amusing, are disfigured by childish vanity, by the constant obtrusion of himself and his own achievements, and—at least in the later volumes—by wanton misrepresentation and inaccuracy. Repeating Arbuthnot's witty saying on Curll's biographies, Sir Charles Wetherell declared that 'his noble and biographical friend had added a new terror to death.' See the Life by his daughter, the Hon. Mrs Hardcastle (1881); Foss's Judges, ix. 155-167; Sugden's Misrepresentations in Campbell's Lives.