Thomas Hare (28 March 1806 in England – 6 May 1891) was a British lawyer and supporter of electoral reform. He is credited with inventing the single transferable vote system of proportional representation which he was a proponent and defender, now used in national elections in Ireland and Malta, in Australian Senate and state elections, and in city elections in Northern Ireland, the U.S., New Zealand and Scotland.
He was born on 28 March 1806, the illegitimate son of Anne Hare of Leigh, Dorset. (Alumni Cantabrigienses considers that a 19th-century identification was incorrect. It identified Anne Hare's son with the Thomas Hare who matriculated at Queens' College, Cambridge in 1823, graduating B.A. in 1827, and M.A. in 1846.)
Brought up on a Dorset farm, Hare had a scanty education. He went to London and found work as a solicitor's clerk. On 14 November 1828 he was admitted a student of the Inner Temple, and he was called to the bar on 22 November 1833. He practiced law in the chancery courts. In 1853 Hare became an Inspector of Charities for the Charity Commission.
Hare was a member of the London-based Athenaeum Club and Political Economy Club. In 1859, he met John Stuart Mill. He was also a member of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, and from 1867 was on the committee of the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women. He worked with Lydia Becker on suffrage petitions. He attended the 1867 funeral of the Manchester suffragist Max Kyllmann, to support his wife Philippine Kyllmann; who two years later fell out with Becker. Under Mill's influence, Hare became involved in the co-operative movement from 1869, and joined the Land Tenure Reform Association (1869 to 1873) for "free trade in land", following the ideas of Mill and William Thomas Thornton.
Hare's STV books and support from John Stuart Mill and others
The Machinery of Representation (1857)
A Treatise on Election of Representatives, Parliamentary and Municipal (1859)
The Election of Representatives Parliamentary and Municipal: a Treatise (1865)
Hare's major work The Machinery of Representation appeared in 1857 (two editions) and editions of his Treatise on the Election of Representatives: Parliamentary and Municipal appeared between 1859 and 1873. In these works, he presented and developed his ideas on proportional representation using ranked votes (STV), which John Stuart Mill in 1873 described as
the greatest improvement of which the system of representative government is susceptible; an improvement which…exactly meets and cures the grand, and what before seemed inherent, defect of the representative system.
In 1859 Mill wrote a review for Fraser's Magazine under the title "Recent Writers on Reform", calling Hare's Treatise remarkable, and noting also "Mr. Hare passes an unqualified and most just condemnation on the exclusion of women from the suffrage".
A system along lines described by Hare was publicised by Henry Fawcett in Mr. Hare's Reform Bill Simplified and Explained (1860). Mill then shifted his ideas from 1859 slightly, emphasizing the role of bullet voting in a multi-winner election contest, as a safeguard for minority groups.
An article The Machinery of Politics and Proportional Representation from 1872 by William Robert Ware, in the American Law Review, was reprinted in London by the Representative Reform Association, a group of allies of Hare set up with support from Walter Morrison who funded George Howell as its secretary from 1868 to 1874, also involving Edmond Beales. Ware's ideas were close to Hare's. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) built on the classification used by Ware of voting systems, in his 1884 pamphlet The Principles of Parliamentary Representation, to give a general formulation and to emphasize larger district magnitude in multi-member districts and each voter casting one vote only.
Hare was also known in the field of law reporting. At a period without official case reports, the published reports of key court decisions allowed them to be used as precedents. From 1841 he reported on the Court of Chancery, on James Wigram's decisions as Vice-Chancellor of England. The series of 11 volumes of Reports of Cases Adjudged in the High Court of Chancery culminated in 1858 with one on cases of William Wood.
Wigram's decrees were considered lucid. Two leading judicial decisions that are still relevant are covered only in Hare's Reports in Chancery:
Henderson v Henderson (1843) 3 Hare 100, from which the rule known as "the rule in Henderson v Henderson" is derived. (The rule provides, broadly, that when a matter becomes the subject of litigation between the parties, each party must bring their whole case before the court so that all aspects of it may be finally decided—subject, of course, to any appeal—once and for all. In the absence of special circumstances, the parties cannot later return to the court to advance arguments, claims or defences which they could have put forward for decision on the first occasion but failed to raise.)
Foss v Harbottle (1843) 2 Hare 461, from which a rule is derived, still the cornerstone of minority shareholder rights in company law in common law legal systems over 160 years later.
Hare was a co-author, with Henry Iltid Nicholl and John Monson Carrow, of the initial 1840 and 1843 volumes of Cases Relating to Railways and Canals 1835–1840, resp. 1840–1842.