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Lord Denning, whose bent for favoring the relaxed precepts of common sense over the starchier ones of common law earned him the nickname the People's Judge, died today at Hampshire County Hospital in Winchester. He was 100. He rose to prominence as the person in charge of the inquiry into the 1963 sex and politics scandal caused when John Profumo, the Secretary of War in Harold Macmillan's Government, lied to Parliament about the affair he was conducting with Christine Keeler, a model who was also sleeping with a Soviet diplomat. Lord Denning's populist appeal became fixed in the public mind when one of the young women involved, Mandy Rice-Davies, said, ''He's one of the nicest judges I know.''

(Alfred Thompson) Denning died Friday at the Hampshire County Hospital in Winchester, England. He was 100. British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who as a young lawyer appeared before Denning, called him \"one of the great men of his age.\" In 1963, Denning was asked to conduct the inquiry into what was popularly known as the Profumo scandal. John Profumo, then British secretary of state for war, was forced to resign after lying to Parliament and admitting he shared a mistress, Christine Keeler, with a Soviet naval attache.

ON PAGE 5 on November 26 Lord Denning was said to have gained \"a triple first at Cambridge\". In fact Lord Denning gained his triple first at Oxford, where he was an undergraduate at Magdalen College during the early 1920s.

(Alfred Thompson) Denning's most abiding and probably least deserved reputation was as a liberal. He adhered throughout his life to a conservative set of personal and public values, and he gave effect to them in his private life in rural Hampshire, in his judgments and in his numerous public pronouncements off the bench. It was these values that led him, as a newly-appointed judge in the 1940s, to devise a legal doctrine which lawyers regarded as revolutionary, but which performed the elementary moral task of holding people to their promises - something which the commercially-oriented common law had found it expedient not to do. His literary style, in fact, is perhaps his most underrated achievement. While in his many books the simplicity is studied and sometimes embarrassingly overdone, Denning's judgments in case after case performed the feat, achieved by no other judge, of speaking directly and compellingly to ordinary people in well-constructed and lucid prose. Concepts which lawyers had struggled to articulate, clashes of doctrine which seemed insoluble, would emerge in his judgments as crystalline statements of principle. For all the professional smirks generated by Denning's famous opening line in a judgment about an appalling motor accident (`It was bluebell time in Kent'), this accessibility of language was the rock on which his popularity and influence were built. When, not long after his retirement, he appeared in full wig and gown on Jim'll Fix It and tried Little Noddy for knocking down PC Plod, what stuck in the mind was not the incongruity but the homogeneity of it - the same benign moralism as the legal profession had known for 40 years, in prose begotten by Samuel Smiles upon Enid Blyton. But Denning's simple language went with a penetrating mind. The son of a draper, he was born in Whitchurch, Hampshire, and educated at the village school and Andover Grammar, before going on to Magdalen College, Oxford. Of his four brothers, one became a general, another an admiral. After war service in France - where two of his brothers died - Denning began his university life as a mathematical scholar, took honours in that subject and then in law, and went on to shine at the Bar. His marriage to Mary Harvey, in 1932, produced one son, Robert, a professor of inorganic chemistry and fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford; Mary died in 1941, and Denning's marriage to his second wife, Joan Start, in 1945 lasted until her death in 1992.

LORD Denning, the most celebrated English judge of the 20th century, died yesterday just six weeks after his 100th birthday, leaving an unprecedented mark on the development of English law. Lord Hailsham, when Lord Chancellor, said: `The trouble with Tom Denning is he's always re-making the law and we never know where we are.' Yesterday he said Lord Denning `was obviously a very great judge and he will go down in history as one of the great and controversial judges of the 20th century'. Lord Denning died peacefully at the Hampshire county hospital in Winchester early yesterday. Tributes came from the Lord Chancellor, judges, lawyers, and from the Prime Minister, who revealed that he had appeared before Lord Denning as a young barrister.

THE phrase may grate a little on some ears, but Lord Irvine, the Lord Chancellor, was surely right to describe Lord 'Tom' Denning as 'the people's judge'. So, too, was Lady Thatcher, who described 'his love of liberty and passion for justice'. It was always hard to put Lord Denning - who died yesterday, six weeks after his 100th birthday - in any political pigeonhole and he had many critics on both ends of the spectrum. His old-fashioned, Victorian love of God, Queen and country, of liberty and of traditional values, made Denning infuriatingly difficult to categorise.

LORD DENNING, former Master of the Rolls and one of the great figures of British law this century, has died aged 100. A brilliant advocate, he took silk before he was 40, was a High Court judge at 45, Lord Justice of Appeal in 1948, a Law Lord in 1962, and finally Master of the Rolls.

He will be chiefly remembered for his championing of the cause of the individual against the big battalions of government or commerce. One colleague said of him: \"When [Tom] Denning begins a judgment by saying 'The plaintiff is a poor widow', you can be fairly certain the plaintiff is going to succeed.\" Another judge said: \"He never allowed precedent to get in the way, and he had an extraordinary knack in the Appeal Court of persuading his fellow judges to agree with his often heretical decisions of legal principle.\" He achieved what he did by using language which was almost Biblical in its directness and simplicity. Not for him the gobbledygook beloved of so many lawyers, but phrases which were both graphic and homely. This was his judgment in a 1982 case: \"The freedom of the Press is extolled as one of the great bulwarks of liberty. It is entrenched in the constitution of the world. In 1987, after he had retired, Lord Denning quoted that judgment when writing an article disagreeing with the Law Lords' decision to stop publication of Spy-catcher, although it was already in the public domain. In another article he was asked to write about the 1989 law reforms, he went to the heart of the matter. They completely ignored, he said, \"the two great evils affecting our system of justice - high costs and great delays\" - and he advocated an extension of legal aid to the middle-classes. \"They are the people who cannot afford either to bring a case or to defend it.\"

Tom Denning was one of the first judges to have any motion of `rights', albeit conceiving them as powers belonging to citizens through birth (in England), status (an unblemished and hardworking life) and loyalty, to the Crown. The common law he confronted after the war was a grab-bag of `precedents' - cases decided over the centuries - which delivered results that were often unjust. Freedom under the law was the freedom of rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges. It was Denning's crusade to do `justice' - ie to produce a result which favoured the `good citizen' - that led him (single-handedly at first) to revolutionise the civil law to reflect the dictates of middle-class morality. Ironically in retrospect, his iconoclasm seemed to presage a revolution in the courts to compare with those increasingly on the streets: for the 60s law student, the Beatles, Vietnam protests, and Denning's dissenting judgments were all part of a brave new world. He seduced through his energy and his charisma, visiting almost every University in the Commonwealth (especially, let it be said, the black Commonwealth) to speak at student dinners. He would begin by asking to be pelted with bread rolls (`I am the Master of the Rolls. So throw them at me.') He then told some terrible jokes (the deaf verger at the Temple church who complained `the agnostics here are terrible'). Then he would spellbindingly recount his battles on behalf of `the little man' with less imaginative law lords, interspersed with quotes from Dickens and Sir Walter Scott. Finally, his credo: `I must do justice, whatever the law may be.'