MOVING TO FRONT–ORIGINALLY POSTED MAY 2, MANY NEW UPDATES
After H.L.A. Hart (his teacher), Raz was the most important figure in Anglophone legal philosophy, and also made significant contributions to political and moral philosophy. During his long tenure at Oxford, he trained many other legal philosophers, including John Gardner, Leslie Green, Andrei Marmor, Denise Reaume, Julie Dickson, Brian Bix, and Scott Shapiro, among others. I will write more and add links later today. As it happens, I am teaching his seminal paper "Authority, Law, and Morality" in jurisprudence this very day.
SOME MORE: Raz's three most important books were Practical Reason and Norms (1975), The Authority of Law (1979), and The Morality of Freedom (1986). Many entries at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy discuss Raz's views: his argument for exclusive legal positivism; perfectionism (and generally); and obligations and reasons. A concern with the nature and kinds of reasons runs throughout his work, and figures, for example, in the paper I mentioned I'm teaching today (authoritative directives give exclusionary reasons for acting, and since all law claims authority, law must satisfy certain non-normative prerequisites for claiming authority…which rules out the inclusive positivism that Hart endorsed in the "Postscript" to The Concept of Law.) Although much indebted to Hart, Raz explicitly rejected both Hart's naturalism and his skepticism about the objectivity of evaluative judgments. (I'm with Hart, not Raz on this issue!) My former student Michael Sevel (Sydney) is finishing the first comprehensive treatment of Raz's entire philosophy for OUP, which shall shed new light on the deep connections between his work in moral, political, and legal philosophy.
I'll add some more personal recollections later. Readers are welcome to do the same in the comments. (Submit comments only once, they may take awhile to appear, given my schedule today.)
ANOTHER: Despite some debilitating health problems the last few years, Raz continued doing philosophical work. His most recent book just appeared this past February, edited by his former student, the moral philosopher Ulrike Heuer (UCL).
SOME PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS: I first met Joseph in the summer of 1995 at Oxford, at an informal conference organized by Oxford and University of Southern California. I presented some of my work on American legal realism. Having never met him before, and being a youngster, I was rather taken aback by the aggressive nature of his questioning (and I had gone to Michigan, the place where students would sometimes cry in seminar!). There was no hostility in Raz's style of questions, but he also had no "bedside manner." While surprised (having never engaged with him before), I didn't mind, and the questions helped me clarify and revise the paper. I held my own well enough, I guess, that John Gardner, who was also there, asked me to review Neil Duxbury's philosophically feeble Patterns of American Jurisprudence for Oxford Journal of Legal Studies.
On the same occasion, Raz hosted a reception at his house, and there was the other side of Joseph: very warm, mild, friendly, and enjoying a good laugh or story. This was almost always true of Joseph: outside the seminar room, he was a pussycat; in the seminar room he was a soft-spoken saber-toothed tiger.
As Alon Harel notes in comments, below, Joseph was not prone to compliments: in matters philosophical, he was "all business." It was thus very memorable for me when, at the 2nd annual Analytic Legal Philosophy conference at Columbia Law School in 1997, Raz told me he liked my paper on "Objectivity, Morality, and Adjudication." (It probably helped that, like almost everyone else in legal philosophy, he found Dworkin's views perplexing.) A decade or so later, he invited me to the seminar he ran at Columbia on legal philosophy to present a version of "Explaining Theoretical Disagreement". That seminar helped improve the paper, but again, most memorable to me, was that he thought my error theoretic interpretation of theoretical interpretation was, in fact, Hart's view.
Joseph and his partner Penelope Bulloch, had a lovely flat in Marylebone, London, where I visited him on a couple of occasions. As he joked, it was the flat Columbia's salary allowed him to buy (after he began teaching part-time at Columbia Law School). His flat featured, as I recall, many of his photographs, some of which also grace various books. There was also a nearby Swedish restaurant he particularly liked, and where they liked him.
Although we had occasional correspondence, the last time I saw Joseph was in fall 2017 at Columbia Law School when I gave a talk on academic freedom. Joseph was mostly sympathetic to what I had to say, but thought it a problem that on my Humboldtian account of academic freedom, it applied only indirectly to students. I disagreed with Raz about this, but it certainly reflects his deep devotion to his students that he thought academic freedom had to encompass even those who were not yet masters of a discipline.
I feel very fortunate to have known Joseph Raz, not just intellectually, but also personally. Mortality be damned!
ANOTHER: A tribute from a few years ago by his former student Timothy Macklem (emeritus, King's College, London).
A MEMORIAL NOTICE from the Oxford philosophy faculty.
STILL MORE: The memorial notice from Columbia Law Schoool, as well as a briefer one from the Oxford law faculty.
ANOTHER MEMORIAL from King's College, London.
IN ADDITION: A memorial notice from the Criminal Justice Theory Blog, with particular attention to his impact on criminal law theory through students like John Gardner.
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