Sir Royston Miles "Roy" Goode is an academic commercial lawyer in the United Kingdom. He founded the Centre for Commercial Law Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. He was awarded the OBE in 1972 followed by the CBE in 1994 before being knighted for services to academic law in 2000. He is a fellow of St John's College, Oxford. He was formerly the Norton Rose Professor of English law at Oxford University, and is now an Emeritus Professor of Law at the University. He was made an honorary Bencher of the Inner Temple in 1988. He was presented with an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree by The College of Law in November 2011. Goode spent 17 years in private practice as a solicitor before turning to academia. He was educated at Highgate School in North London, and obtained his law degree by external study through the University of London External Programme. In the foreword to a book writing in honour of Goode upon his retirement the story is recounted that he decided to write a legal textbook a relatively youthful age to fill in time during the evening. He picked his subject by reading through a legal catalogue of subjects in alphabetical order until he came to a subject upon which no book had been published in the last 20 years – hire purchase. Although Goode professed that he knew nothing about hire purchase law, he duly researched and wrote the book, which became the leading text in the field, thereby launching a career of distinguished academic writing. Goode was also a member of the Crowther Committee on Consumer Credit, the Monopolies and Mergers Commission and the DTI Advisory Committee on Arbitration. He chaired the Pension Law Review Committee, which was set up following the Maxwell scandal, and which led to a report on Pension Law Reform and the Pensions Act 1995. He was previously chairman of the executive committee of JUSTICE, the all-party human rights and law reform organisation, and a member of the Governing Council of UNIDROIT. He is also known for his writings on documentary letters of credit and demand guarantees; he has called these financial instruments "abstract payment undertakings". This term, as most academic writers would agree, is Roy Goode's.
