Joseph Raz 1939 - 2022

London, 9 July 2012 © Nicos Stavropoulos

When I first arrived at Brasenose to start the DPhil more than 30 years ago, a note from Joseph was waiting in my pigeonhole. I vaguely knew who he was but had never met him. A few days later we met in his room at Balliol (Staircase XIII on the first floor I believe). He was nothing like the other dons I had seen around the college quads. He said he was not my supervisor — Ronald Dworkin was — but was standing in that term because Ronnie was in New York. He asked me to write something and come back to discuss it. We agreed that I’d write about something I had recently read. I took the entire term to produce a paper on a then novel position about legal interpretation that drew on Kripke’s and Putnam’s work on meaning and necessity. We then met to discuss my piece and I had the experience I later learned was typical of graduate students working with Joseph. Forceful is an understatement of his style of critical feedback. He announced to me that the position I was discussing had nothing to do with what I had declared it to be all about. I was not amused and pushed back hard. I found the heat of the exchange disturbing, but he seemed to be in his element.

Following that meeting, Ronnie Dworkin was back from New York and I had no further one on one meetings with Joseph for the rest of my time as a graduate student. My philosophical attention was elsewhere, but I followed his seminars on authority, held in Room XXIII under the Balliol SCR, and I started working my way through his work. He was friendly throughout, and by the time I finished the DPhil I realized that I was quite fond of that deeply unusual, brilliant man.

He was extremely supportive once I returned to Oxford to start teaching — he was a legendary mentor and supporter of former students and other junior colleagues. At seminars and workshops he was his usual self, direct, forceful, unsparing, but I had learned how to handle that and shared in his delight at being part of the fray. He was a different man outside the seminar room, courteous, gentle, funny. Our friendship grew over the years. I will sorely miss our dinners in London, when he would march me down the streets of Marylebone at high speed to one of his local favourites. I will miss his love of industry gossip, his pithy put downs, his fine nose, and disdain, for the pompous and the phony, his delight at hearing news, personal and professional, of others in the business. I will miss the excitement of finding that he had just posted a new draft and dropping whatever I was doing to start reading it. I will even miss his full force frontal take no prisoners attacks on whatever claim I might be minded to defend at one time or other. He made us all think more carefully about everything.