Former President of the New Zealand Law Commission and senior New Zealand judge Sir (Robert) Grant Hammond has died aged 75.

Sir Grant died on Friday, 31 May and a service will be held for him in Auckland at 12pm on Friday, 7 June at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, 2 Burleigh Street, Grafton, Auckland 1023.

An obituary for Sir Grant is available here.

Raised on a dairy farm in Te Awamutu, Sir Grant graduated LLB and MPhil from Auckland University. He practised in Auckland as a partner in Wiseman and Hammond, before becoming a litigation partner in Hamilton for Tompkins Wake.

In 1978 he became a Visiting Fellow at the University of Illinois College of Law and completed an LLM in 1979. He was Associate Professor of Law at the University of Alberta in Canada from 1982 to 1988. He returned to New Zealand in 1989 and was appointed Professor of Law at the University of Auckland, becoming Dean of Law in 1990.

Sir Grant was appointed a judge of the High Court in 1992, the youngest appointment to that court at the time. He was appointed to the Court of Appeal in January 2004 and served on that court until 2011. In 2010 Sir Grant was appointed President of the New Zealand Law Commission and also chair of Parliament's Legislative Advisory Committee. He retired as Law Commission President in 2016.

Sir Grant was made a Knight Companion of the New Zealand order of Merit in the 2011 Queen's Birthday Honours List for services to the law. He was the recipient of the prestigious Robert S Campbell Fellow at Magdalen College of Oxford University in 2008, and in 2014 was made one of only two Distinguished Fellows of Victoria University of Wellington.