Born at the Manor House, Barrasford, near Chollerton, Northumberland, 14 June 1862, the second child and second son of William George Laws, civil engineer, and Ellinor Shields, his wife. He was educated at the Newcastle Grammar School and at the University of Durham, where he was an associate in science, scholar, and exhibitioner. He received his medical education at Edinburgh and at St Thomas's Hospital, acting as ophthalmic house surgeon and afterwards becoming a clinical assistant at the Royal London Ophthalmic Hospital, Moorfields. Deciding to specialize in eye work he settled at Nottingham, where he soon became popular and was appointed surgeon to the Nottingham and Midland Eye Infirmary. He gave up practice in 1929 and retired to King's Langley, Hertfordshire, where he died 26 May 1936. He married, 27 December 1893, Helen Maria, daughter of the Rev. Joseph Rawson Lumby, Lady Margaret professor of divinity at Cambridge, who survived him with a family of two boys and a daughter, the eldest son having been killed in action during the first world war. Laws was a member of the council of the Ophthalmological Society 1909-11, president of the section of ophthalmology at the Nottingham meeting of the British Medical Association 1926, and assistant editor of the *Ophthalmic Review*, 18-28, 1899-1909.