Lord Caplan, a former High Court appeal judge and one of the most prominent Jewish members of Scotland's judiciary, has died after a long illness. He was 79.
Lord Caplan retired from the High Court bench in 2000 after 11 years service in which he oversaw some of Scotland's most famous civil and criminal legal cases.
After hearing a damages claim following the 1988 Piper Alpha disaster which lasted 391 days, took 13 million words of evidence, and cost an estimated £10m, he ordered that oil companies pay more than £100m in damages.
He was famously called "pompous" by the then leader of the Anti-Poll Tax Federation and future Scottish Socialist Party leader, Tommy Sheridan, whom he jailed for contempt of court for six months in 1992. The description resurfaced during Mr Sheridan's defamation case against the News of the World in 2006 when Lord Turnbull told him: "I know Mr Sheridan has a certain opinion of judges..."
Philip Isaac Caplan was educated at Eastwood School in Renfrewshire before studying law at Glasgow University. He worked for a solicitor between 1952 and 1956, was called to the bar in 1957, and took silk in 1970.
Lord Caplan had two sons and one daughter from his first marriage and a daughter with his second wife, Joyce, whom he married in 1974. He died on Friday and there will be a private funeral service.
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