In memoriam: Professor William Twining, 1934-2025

It is with deep sadness that I share that Advisory Board member Professor William Twining died on 9 October 2025, at the age of 91. William started his career teaching Law in Sudan and Tanzania, before being appointed to a Chair at Queen's University Belfast at the age of 32. In 1972, his move to Warwick Law School inspired his pioneering conceptual rethinking of evidence, as he explained to me in this insightful 2022 interview. William's work on analysis of evidence with Terence Anderson and David Schum brought the Wigmore chart method to popular attention, and his writings offered fresh perspectives on leading theorists including Bentham, Thayer, Llewelyn, and Hart.

William was Quain Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London from 1983 and Emeritus Professor at UCL from his retirement in 2004.  His commitment to fostering conversations about concepts of evidence that transcend disciplinary boundaries was a huge part of his life's work right up until his death, and he foresaw that the Evidence Dialogues project would be a fitting successor to two groundbreaking projects that he led at UCL (colloquially referred to as "Evidence I" and "Evidence II"). He spent much of the last few years exploring evidential reasoning in contexts other than law, including astronomy; intelligence analysis, and spectroscopy.

As well as being a remarkable intellectual, William was, perhaps above all, an incredible mentor and friend to so many people. He reviewed the manuscript of Proving International Crimes several times before its submission to the publishers, always challenging me to push further with my ideas and arguments. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the TRUE project and the last time I saw him, at his home in July 2025, one of the first things he asked was, "And how is TRUE?".

The entire team sends our deepest condolences to William's wife Penelope, his children Karen and Peter, his grandchildren and great-grandson, and his many friends around the world. We will miss him terribly, but are motivated by his legacy to carry on his great tradition of rigorous, thought-provoking, interdisciplinary legal scholarship.