James Law obituary

My friend James Law, who has died aged 65 of a heart attack, was one of the world’s leading researchers into child language development. His research was dedicated to improving the lives of children with communication needs and to the transformation of public health approaches to speech and language therapy.

He was born in Guildford, the son of Rosemary (nee Bowman), an interior designer, and Douglas Law, a lawyer and publisher. After education at Wellington college, and a degree in linguistics and history at East Anglia University, James trained in London at the Kingdon Ware School of Speech Therapy (now part of City, University of London) where, from the first, his approach was creative and individual. Always drawn to working with children and young people, he believed in gaining the trust of the whole family, understanding the story.

A born collaborator, James relished his first academic role as a lecturer at City, stoking an atmosphere of enquiry and debate, and rising to be head of the department of speech therapy.

In 2003 he moved with his partner Jane Macer and their two young children, Isla and Euan, to Scotland, where they both had family ties and a much-loved cottage in the Highlands. For a while James co-ordinated health services research across the Edinburgh region but in 2010 was invited to take up a chair at Newcastle University.

As professor of speech and language sciences, he finally found the freedom to expand his interest in child language development, travelling the world to share, learn and connect. Students and colleagues attest as to how tirelessly he gave of his time and knowledge. One student remembers a phone conversation from a train in which connection failed 10 times. He persisted and finished the call.

James was a modest man, and it was hard to draw him out on the the subject of being appointed OBE in 2018 for services to the profession he had worked so diligently to shape. Those close to him, however, knew how much this meant, because it indicated that “the work had been heard”.

James brought people together, across disciplines, to explore what interventions worked and made a real difference to vulnerable children and their families. In recent years he led a European-funded research network over 43 countries in 30 languages, studies from which will benefit children for years to come. His insight and wry humour will be greatly missed.

He and Jane married in 2017. She survives him, along with Euan and Isla, and his brother, Nicholas.