John Sankey, 1st Viscount Sankey

John Sankey, 1st Viscount Sankey (26 October 1866 to 6 February 1948) was a British lawyer, judge and Labour politician who served as Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain from 1929 to 1935 under Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald. He became famous for his judgments in the House of Lords, most notably in Woolmington v DPP (1935), where he established that the prosecution bears the burden of proving a defendant guilty, a principle he described as the one golden thread running throughout English criminal law. Sitting on the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, he also delivered significant rulings on Canadian constitutional law, including Edwards v Canada (Attorney General), the Persons Case, in which he affirmed women eligibility for Senate appointments and introduced the living tree doctrine of constitutional interpretation. He lent his name to the Sankey Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1940, which set out eleven fundamental human rights ahead of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/