Lawrence Alexander remembers Joseph Raz

I have a few Joseph Raz stories. But the one I'm going to tell took place in 1977. In the summer of that year, the National Endowment for the Humanities funded a five-week law and philosophy "summer camp" on the campus of Williams College. I can't remember the names of all of the thirty or so people who attended, but here or some, in no particular order: Myke Bayles, Bernard Williams, Charles Fried, Alan Wertheimer, Steve Darwall, Steve Munzer, Carl Cranor, Conrad Johnson, Gerald Postema, Wade Robison, Hans Oberdiek, Ronald Dworkin, and Raz. The days consisted of morning lectures by the more notable invitees--e.g., Dworkin, Raz, Williams, Fried--and afternoons devoted to recreation. For me that was pick-up basketball and golf. There were also occasional softball games, one memorably umpired by Dworkin, who alternated his umpiring between the model of rules and umpire's discretion.

Raz's lectures were analytically powerful. Dworkin's lectures, though characteristically unmatched in terms of their rhetorical power and style, some of us, Raz included, found particularly galling. For when Dworkin would say A, and then be challenged by someone--often Raz--pointing out that A would lead to an absurd result, Dworkin would respond by denying that he had said A and asserting that it would be ridiculous to assume that he had said A. And he would do this so forcefully and yet gracefully that the critic wouldn't know how to respond. I had had Dworkin as a teacher, but I had never witnessed this piece of Dworkin legerdemain before. You the reader have undoubtedly witnessed this Dworkin performance yourself--perhaps many times.

When it was time for Raz to depart from the summer camp, I drove him to the Albany airport, giving me an hour alone with him. I learned that he was not only disappointed but somewhat miffed that Oxford had chosen Dworkin, not him, for the chair in jurisprudence. And I could understand why Raz felt this way but also why Oxford had chosen Dworkin. In terms of substance, I thought Raz was Dworkin's superior. But in terms of style, no one, Raz included, could top Dworkin. And Oxford had gone for style over substance.

Professor Lawrence Alexander, University of San Diego