The lord chief justice has led tributes to Sir Henry Hodge, one of the first solicitors to become a High Court judge, who died last week aged 65.

Lord Judge said that Hodge had been ‘an outstanding president of the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal, a distinguished High Court Judge, and a man whose warmth enriched all his judicial colleagues’.

Lord justice Carnwath, senior president of tribunals, described Hodge’s death as ‘a great blow to the tribunals judiciary. His accomplishments as a solicitor and judge were formidable, but his easy and friendly manner will be remembered with equal fondness’.

Hodge was admitted as a solicitor in 1970 and spent his early career with the Child Poverty Action Group and as chairman of the National Council for Civil Liberties before founding the north London legal aid practice Hodge Jones & Allen. He served as deputy vice-president of the Law Society in the 1990s. In an interview with the Gazette following his appointment to the High Court in 2004, Hodge said that solicitors faced pressure from their firms not to go into the judiciary ‘and it is getting worse’. He had a high political profile as the husband of former Labour minister Margaret Hodge. Hodge’s friends and family are requesting donations to Leukaemia Research’s ‘Big Five-0’ appeal in his memory – www.bigfive-0.co.uk.