Sir Brian Kerr is the Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, the province's senior judge. He was appointed in 2004 after Lord Carswell ascended to the House of Lords; as is customary, he will replace Lord Carswell as the sole Northern Irish law lord when he retires next year. Sir Brian, 60, attended the Queen's University of Belfast before joining the Northern Irish Bar in 1970 and the English Bar four years later. He was a Crown prosecutor before becoming a High Court judge in 1993. As Lord Chief Justice, he has presided over modernising reforms and made headlines recently for overturning a libel award against a newspaper for publishing a scathing review of Goodfellas, a Belfast restaurant — a judgment hailed as a victory by food critics everywhere.

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