Derek Roebuck obituary

My husband Derek Roebuck, who has died aged 85 of heart failure, started his professional life as a solicitor in Stalybridge and Manchester in the 1960s, but soon accepted a teaching post at the University of Wellington, New Zealand.

In 1968, he moved to the University of Tasmania, where he was professor of law for 10 years, and also dean. He was active in anti-Vietnam war politics, and was among those in Angola monitoring the trial of mercenaries, resulting in The Whores of War (1977), written with Wilfred Burchett.

His appointment as Amnesty International’s head of research in 1979 was controversial because of his leftwing politics. Derek and I met there while I was campaign co-ordinator in the British section, and were married in 1981.

The following year, we moved from London to a five-year posting in Papua New Guinea, where Derek was again professor and dean of the UPNG Law School and also practised as a criminal defence barrister.

In 1987 Derek was appointed to set up a new law school in Hong Kong at the City Polytechnic, later City University. He remained there for 10 years as professor and sometimes dean, practising, too, as duty lawyer in the magistrates courts. Those years allowed him regularly to play cricket which, with opera, were his abiding pleasures.

In Hong Kong, arbitration – dispute resolution outside the law courts – entered his life, and he set up a department teaching it. The subject gained further traction when Neil Kaplan, the founder of the Arbitration Centre, asked him to write a historical introduction to his own arbitration study. Derek was hooked.

Already the author of 40 legal titles, his 10-volume history of arbitration and mediation, starting with Ancient Greek Arbitration, was to dominate the last 22 years of his life in Oxford, for 10 years of which he also edited the journal of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators. The final volume he was able to write, with two co-authors –English Arbitration and Mediation in the Long Eighteenth Century – was published in November last year by the small publishing house we set up to publish our work.

Derek was born in Stalybridge, Cheshire (now part of Greater Manchester), the son of John Roebuck, a postman, and Jessie (nee Thorpe), a former bookbinder. From a local school, he gained a scholarship to Manchester grammar school, and then to Hertford College, Oxford, where he studied first classics and then law.

Soon after graduation he married Peggy Mounkley and they had three children, Derek, Paul and Lucy. The marriage ended in divorce. Derek is survived by me, his children and two grandchildren, Christopher and Anna.