Anton Fagan remembers Joseph Raz

Raz supervised or taught several people who have gone (or went) on to become accomplished legal philosophers in their own right, such as John Gardner, Leslie Green, Andrei Marmor, Timothy Endicott, Scott Shapiro, Julie Dickson, Timothy Macklem, and Grant Lamond. He also supervised me, who has not. I suppose it just goes to show that, once in a while, everyone gets to back the wrong horse.

Nonetheless, Raz’s supervision was inspiring: though not necessarily in the ways you would expect. I remember my first supervision meeting with him, at which I arrived with some trepidation. A few days earlier, I had been told that another DPhil student, after his first meeting with Raz, had spent his entire train journey back to London in tears. The draft chapter which I had submitted to Raz had taken me months to write. And, by this time, with three degrees under my belt, the last of which had required me to write more than fifty philosophy essays, I thought myself a competent writer. However, Raz started the meeting by informing me, very politely, that I needed ‘to practise some verbal hygiene’, and then went on to explain that I had used a key concept (I forget what it was) in six different ways. The distinctions were subtle, and I am not sure I grasped all of them. But I got the main point, which was that legal philosophy is an exacting discipline, and I was going to have to up my game.

Raz did not condescend. He engaged with the work I submitted to him in the way he would have engaged with a conference paper or article written by one of his peers. So, if he thought an argument which I had made was weak or wrong-headed, he told me so and expected me either to defend or to abandon it. On one occasion, having had every one of my arguments in defence of a position I had taken pretty much demolished by Raz, I in desperation appealed to the fact that his equally eminent Oxford colleague, Ronald Dworkin, had expressed the same view in several of his writings. Raz wryly responded: ‘Well, Anton, the fact that Dworkin has made a mistake is no reason for you to repeat it.’ Again, the lesson was learned. Jurisprudential disagreements cannot be settled by invoking the authority of others. They are won or lost only on the strength of the reasons and arguments advanced for each of the competing views. 

Raz was not unkind. But he could be impatient with academic pretension. In a postgraduate jurisprudence seminar which he was giving on the notion of coherence in the law, an American student asked one of those questions which is really a statement, dressed up as a question, aimed in part at exhibiting the speaker’s intellectual prowess. The question went on and on, in ever more convoluted circles, and throughout it Raz kept his gaze fixed on his notes. When the question finally came to an end, Raz looked up momentarily, said ‘No’, and continued the seminar as if it had never been interrupted. Though I am not certain of this, because it was almost thirty years ago, I think that the student in question went on to hold a very high office in the US justice system, under the auspices of Donald Trump."

Anton Fagan, WP Schreiner Professor of Law, University of Capetown Faculty of Law