It's particularly painful for me to have to report the untimely death (due to cancer) this morning of the legal and moral philosopher John Gardner, Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and before that the Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford. I'm traveling, but will add more thoughts and links in the coming days. This is a huge loss for legal philosophy at Oxford, and a great loss for the international community of legal philosophers, of which John was a beloved member. My deepest condolences to his family.
ADDENDUM: John has a wonderful personal page, with links to papers and talks, as well as photos and more.
A BIT MORE: When John took over the Professorship of Jurisprudence, it had been held for nearly thirty years by Ronald Dworkin, who was part-time only, although that overstates his involvement. Dworkin supervised hardly any students, and did almost nothing to organize events for the benefit of jurisprudence students. John was the opposite, by several orders of magnitude. John was tireless on the administrative and pedagogical fronts, doing what the Professor of Jurisprudence was supposed to do. Quite apart from his commitment to the program, he was "very clever" as the Brits like to say, analytically acute, both in writing and in conversation. He was an especially brilliant and amusing critic, as in his argument that a "constructive interpretation" of Dworkin shows him to be a legal positivist, or his critique (with his frequent collaborator Tim Macklem) of Scott Shapiro's book.
ANOTHER: A memorial notice from the Oxford Law faculty, which includes several nice photos, including one of John overlooking the Texas Hill country during his and Les Green's joint visit to UT Austin back in 2004. (Thanks to Les Green for sending this along.)
AND ANOTHER lovely memorial written by Annalise Acorn (Alberta). (Thanks to Jake Woljtowicz for the pointer.)
ON A MORE PERSONAL NOTE John was always a source of sage advice and perspective on, shall we say, the peculiarities of the philosophy profession in the Internet era. For posterity, I should now credit him as the author of two sets of sage and amusing remarks, here and the first comment here. I shall miss his counsel.
ANOTHER: An obituary (by Nicola Lacey [LSE]) at The Guardian.
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