Nicholas Joseph Orville Liverpool

Nicholas Joseph Orville Liverpool was the president of Dominica from October 2003 to September 2012. Born on September 9, 1934, Liverpool schooled in Dominica before heading to the UK in 1957 where he obtained his Law degree in 1960 from the University of Hull. Called to the Inner Temple bar in 1961, he proceeded to the University of Sheffield where he got his Ph.D degree in 1965. The University of Hull gave him a Doctor of Laws degree in 2011.

Liverpool worked as a law lecturer at the University of the West Indies in Barbados and became the dean of the institution’s law school in 1992 before his resignation after 18 years at the university. He later became a regional judge and an appeal court judge in Grenada, Belize and other Caribbean countries. He worked on several commissions and tribunals for legal reforms after becoming a high court judge in Antigua and Montserrat. In 2002, he was appointed as chairman of the constitutional review commission in Grenada.

Between 1998 and 2001, Nicholas Liverpool was Dominica’s ambassador to the United States. He was on UNESCO’s governing board between 2002 and 2003. In October 2003, the House of Assembly in Dominica elected him as the nation’s president and he served till 2008 for his first term and from 2008 to 2012 for his second term in office.

Following a medical trip to the United States, Nicholas Liverpool died in a Florida hospital on June 1, 2015, at the age of 80. In 2012, His Royal Highness The Duke of Castro, invested Liverpool with the Knight Grand Cross with Gold Star of the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of Saint George, and he was also the Vice Delegate of the Order for Dominica from 2014 until his death in 2015. He was buried in the cemetery of the Roman Catholic Church in Grand Bay. He was survived by wife Verna Liverpool and several children.