Joseph McGeachy Thomson FRSE (6 May 1948 – 12 May 2018[1]) was a Scottish lawyer and academic. He was Regius Professor of Law at the University of Glasgow and a member of the Scottish Law Commission.
Thomson was born in Campbeltown and attended the independent Keil School in Dumbarton. He then studied at the University of Edinburgh, where he graduated LLB in 1970[2] and was awarded the Lord President Cooper Memorial Prize as the outstanding LLB honours graduate.[3]
Following his graduation, Thomson was appointed lecturer at the University of Birmingham, moving in 1974 to King's College London.[2] In 1984, he became Professor of Law at the University of Strathclyde, and in 1991 was appointed to the Regius Chair in Law at the School of Law of the University of Glasgow.[4] He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1996,[5] and was President of the Society of Public Teachers of Law (now the Society of Legal Scholars) in 2000–2001.[6] He was appointed to a five-year term on the Scottish Law Commission in 2000, and received a further four-year term in 2005, at which point he resigned from the Glasgow Chair. He was formerly editor of the Juridical Review,[5] the oldest Scottish legal journal.