Obituary - Peter Allan Hayward 1932-2014

Peter Hayward, MA (Cantab), MA (Oxon), Barrister-at-Law died suddenly on 19th April 2014. Peter was founding director of the Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre (www.oiprc.ox.ac.uk) from 1990, until his retirement in 1998.  Peter created the OIPRC as a multidisciplinary research centre involving scholars in law, economics and business and the centre was started, with the help of a grant from Hitachi, in his rooms in St. Peter’s College Oxford. Though the OIPRC subsequently became part of the Oxford University Law Faculty, St. Peter’s remains the home of Intellectual Property law in the collegiate university as a result of Peter’s work.

Prior to coming to Oxford Peter had started out as a Mathematician at Trinity College, Cambridge before switching to Law and graduating with a 1st. He worked initially in Patent Agency in Leicester and then in 1958 moved to London to work as a Patent Examiner at the Patent Office whilst studying for bar finals. He was called to the bar, at Lincolns Inn in 1958 (Cassell scholar) and practiced at the Patent Bar from 1958 to 1968. Peter was also during this time a Holborn Borough Labour Councillor from 1962-6. In 1968 he moved to become Fellow and Tutor in Jurisprudence at St. Peter's College, a post he held until his retirement by when he was the college’s longest serving law tutor and remembered by several generations of grateful and successful students.  He was Vice-Master of St Peter's 1992-4, and elected an Emeritus Fellow in 1999.

Peter’s research interests included Legal History, particularly Land Law and, of course, Intellectual Property Law.  He was a former editor of the official Reports of Patent Cases and of the Fleet Street Patent Reports. His publications include notably the eleven volumes of Hayward's Patent Cases 1600-1883. This unique set of volumes published by Butterworths in 1988 was reprinted by Lexis Nexis in 2009.

Peter was a devoted husband, father and grandfather, his wife, Elizabeth, predeceased him, and he is survived by his only daughter, Pandora, and two grandsons. Further details of a memorial service will be available on the St. Peter’s College website (http://www.spc.ox.ac.uk/) in due course.