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Tony Honoré as Teacher and Mentor:
A Personal Memoir
J O H N G A R D N E R
In a way, Tony was my first Oxford teacher. It was 9am on Monday 10 October 1983, my first day on duty as a law undergraduate at New College. I was freshest of the fresh, my first tutorial still ahead of me, and two long terms – they looked long to me then – still separating me from the shock and awe of Law Moderations. The Gulbenkian Lecture Theatre was in overflow, students spilling out of their satchels on every step. None of us had yet acquired the Oxford knack, which came so naturally only six months later, of never going to lectures. My tutor had told me to try to get to some of them if I could , so naturally I went to them all. Ex abundante cautela , as the lawyer in me might later have said. The topic that morning was Roman Law (Sources and Delicts). What was that? We had no idea. The lecturer was one Professor A.M. Honoré. Of All Souls College, mysteriously a College of No Students. Did it exist? What did a Professor in such a place do? My father was a Senior Lecturer, a high rank on any informed view. A Professor – a Regius Professor, whatever that may be, and hailing from a College of No Students – was surely a God to the Gods. Professor Honoré, it turned out, was a gentle and kindly lecturer, rather formal, slightly nervous, no clap of thunder, our Jupiter in canny disguise. But his eyes – he could not disguise his eyes – the brightest, the most excited, the most electric eyes, even from thirty feet. I have no idea what was said about Sources or Delicts. I have my notes even now, but oracular notes, long on words and short on meaning in a way that the lecture clearly was not. (How could it have been? With Tony, as I now know, it is always the other way round.) Be that as it may, I went back
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for more. Was it twice a week? Did I always sit half way up on the right, as I now remember it, with that particular view of the dais? I was fascinated. This A.M. Honoré was the Ur professor to me, the one against whom all other Professors must from now on be measured, those minor Professors, the mere Professors of Jurisprudence, the bare Professors of English Law. So it seemed to me throughout my three undergraduate years. Although he apparently lectured on nothing else that I was eligible to study, A.M. Honoré’s works – sometimes now the works of a more casual fellow called ‘Tony Honoré’ – would catch my eye in the Bodleian Law Library or in Blackwell’s. For some reason these books were not on my reading lists. Their titles intrigued me and kept me in suspense. Who were they for, if not for the likes of me? They must contain the secrets of the masters, I thought, the runes of the law to which a mere fledgling has no right of access. I would sometimes sneak a furtive look. The South African Law of Trusts. I was still getting stuck on the English law of Trusts. How many more laws of Trusts did I have to go? Causation in the Law. A whole subject in its own right, it emerged, and not just a few cases on my Torts reading list. Emperors and Lawyers. One of several major excursions into Roman legal history. Where would one find the raw materials? Or the skills to piece them together? How could such a subject be mastered? And how – I wondered most of all – did such diverse works as these emanate from the mind of just one scholar, just one Regius Professor of Civil Law?
Those three undergraduate years were behind me before I had my first conversation with Tony Honoré. The circumstances of our encounter on Saturday 4 October 1986 were not entirely relaxing. It was the opposite of an intimate chat. I had made it through my law degree intact, in spite of getting stuck on Trusts and more than a little fed up with Public Law. I was now starting life as a graduate student and, more in ignorance than in bravery, offered myself as a candidate for a Prize Fellowship at All Souls.
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and threw me a question or two on – good grief! – subjects I had actually studied. No doubt he was similarly encouraging to every candidate. That is, after all, Tony’s way. Perhaps the encouragement simply meant more to me, as someone who, three years before, had spent so many mornings in Tony’s company with Sources and Delicts. That All Souls viva was perhaps the strangest hour of my life to that day, and one of the strangest two or three to this day, but Tony helped me to behave throughout as if it were all perfectly routine. Totally normal. And coming to see the strange as normal, I was duly elected. Now there were many new strangenesses to deal with. And one of the strangest was this: I was a new graduate student, enrolled on a taught programme called the BCL, and also a Fellow of All Souls. Some of my teachers were now also to be my colleagues. Tony, in particular, was to be something called my ‘college advisor’. He paid me lavish attention and talked to me, over tea and cakes in the common room, about the deepest puzzles, yet with the gentlest touch. He encouraged me to write and gave me his comments in the form of perfect microscopic marginalia. He treated me to sneak previews of his own work in progress. He also convened his famous seminars on Causation in the Law as part of one of my BCL courses. Was there some vague conflict of duty or conflict of feeling for him in occupying all of these roles at once? I had no idea. But if there was Tony handled it with mastery. Again he made the strange seem normal. I was never aware of any tension or any awkwardness arising out of our multiple relationships, Fellow-to-Fellow, advisor-to- advisee, teacher-to-student, and soon enough Warden-to-Fellow (for Tony was to become Acting Warden of All Souls, for two years, shortly after I arrived).
I can’t even recall any transition, any shift of gear, between the time when I attended the Causation seminars as a BCL student, and the time when I co-convened them with Tony. The seminars felt just the same either way. Was it just a year later, in
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autumn 1987, that we officially embarked on what are now two decades of collaboration in the classroom? I think perhaps it was. Or perhaps I just came along as a casual visitor to the seminars in 1987, while I was supposed to be studying for the Bar, and then became a formal fixture in the 1988 series? Either way, my close friend and contemporary Annalise Acorn (who was enrolled for the two-year BCL and so took the Causation class a year later than me) has some detailed recollections:
I had the honour of having [Tony] as a supervisor for my BCL thesis and participating in the seminars on causation he held with John Gardner in the wonderful rooms he had as Warden of All Souls. It would have been 1987. Fran Olsen, was visiting from UCLA, and sitting in on the causation seminars. Two more different people one can hardly imagine. Tony: elegant, refined and soft-spoken. Fran: a boisterous flower-child in a constant state of commotion. Tony with his perfectly plummy accent. Fran with her twangy American drawl. Fran was a feminist at the far end of the extremes of the mid 1980’s. She would have caused most men of Tony's generation fits. But Tony engaged her with his usual sincerity and aplomb. Fran was offering the then voguish CLS line; arguing that all determinations of causation in law are all politics all the way down. Tony was defending the more careful views put forward in the book he co-authored with Herbert Hart, Causation in the Law. Of course, we came around (as we had to) to the question: what is to be done when two accused shoot one man at the same time and we can’t tell which bullet killed him. (Nowadays, students would just say – call in CSI and find out.) But jumping off the edge of her seat, Fran eagerly chimed in: ‘Well now, let’s think about this for a minute. So what if he did die from the first bullet? I mean, if I take a gun and shoot a man who has just died or is dying from another bullet wound – well – that’s not a very nice thing for me to do. Is it?’ Tony gave her a long, serene look and said in a slow and even tone: ‘No, Frances, no. That is the sort of thing that if you were to do it we would have to say to you: “Frances, you must never do that again.”’ Then that unmistakable twinkle came into his eyes and he burst into his sweet, kindhearted and infectious laugh. And so did we all. I will never forget that moment. It was perhaps one of the purest comic moments I have ever experienced. And one that could have only come from Tony’s delightful wit.
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who does this. But it is simply a wonderful practice. Who would not like to have their bons mots savoured in such a way? And how often do we do it? In fact I am reminding myself now to try this out, to try to cultivate it. I’d like to learn to do it even though I could never pull it off quite the way that Tony can.
Now this, let me tell you, is exactly what it is like in class. These days Tony and I have, of course, our odd-couple collection of legal and philosophical jokes, old favourites that reappear year in and year out. We even know, more or less, when in the seminar series we are going to savour which one. Have you heard the one about the man who was murdered twice? Have you heard the one about the three indeterminate chocolate vending machines? These tall tales and others like them still seem to us to yield endless opportunities for mirth with words and fun with ideas. But it hardly matters how funny they are in themselves, because what keeps everyone on cloud nine is Tony, his use of language and his use of laughter and what underlies all this, namely his boundless enthusiasm for his subject, or (to be more exact) for whatever subject we are discussing today. This, I think, is our pedagogical secret weapon. It is what keeps Causation 101 working its magic year after year. It is Tony’s extraordinary talent for words and their witty use, combined with Tony’s extraordinary enthusiasm, that makes Tony’s extraordinary talent for ideas and their serious development so powerful in the classroom. It leaves him – I can testify first hand – with the longest trail of the fondest students, always delighted to trek back and have another shot at the puzzles of causal overdetermination even years after they have left Oxford for the oil fields or the law firms.
Maybe now it’s beginning to sound as we have ended up in an educational variant of Groundhog Day, the same topics and even the same jokes coming round again year after year. But it has never been like that at all. We have often reinvented our syllabus, even if we lacked the power to reinvent ourselves.
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Causation has been joined, over the years, by various other topics in the philosophy of tort law. And a second annual seminar series for the BCL and other interested students, dealing with more general problems in legal and political philosophy, started soon after Tony’s retirement as Acting Warden of All Souls, which in turn followed his retirement as Regius Professor. I think it must have been in Michaelmas Term 1992 that we first taught these seminars on Law and Morality. Of course, we no longer had the palace of panelling above the Hovenden Room. But I had meanwhile become a jobbing Tutorial Fellow over on the other side of Radcliffe Square, at Brasenose College, and had coincidentally come into possession of a smaller example of the same arrangement: a rambling suite of interconnecting rooms on the Brasenose Lane side of the college, this time complete with the original, rather crooked joinery and a cast of gloomy ghosts. In this slightly less august but slightly more historically authentic environment we tried to carry on the tradition of discussion without lines, perusing a subject from the comfort of our sofas and armchairs without demarcation of teachers from students or either from visitors. The more general subject-matter of the seminars brought in a larger crowd, and sometimes, at the start of term, the window seats over Brasenose Lane were carrying extra passengers, squeezed in three abreast. What did Kelsen and Hart hold for them? Maybe nothing, for generally by week four most of our remaining window-seat passengers could be upgraded to business class. Nevertheless, in spite of our best efforts, attendances really were growing. The seminars took off, conditions increasingly became too cramped, and in 1996, when I left Brasenose for a more senior post at King’s College London, we seized the opportunity, or the opportunity seized us, to relocate our seminars back to the more spacious accommodation of All Souls. Actually, that must have been in 1997. There was a one-year hiatus when Tony and I didn’t teach together, when I did not make the weekly trek on the express bus back to Oxford. In spite of my excellent students and colleagues at King’s, I
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surprising, under this formidable supervision, that our seminars shifted in more in the direction of general political theory, Hart giving way to Rawls and Kelsen no less aptly to Hayek. In moving the seminars to a public room, especially a room in the viva esque style of the Wharton Room, Tony and I sacrificed some of the intimacy and familiarity of our earlier mode of co-teaching in our own college apartments, sitting around on sofas and armchairs. The seminars grew more formal as they grew larger. There was and still is that long table, and Tony and I have always sat at, or near, the southern end of it, Berlin behind us, Hicks ahead of us, while the students and visitors queue early for the best seats (at the table), lest they be relegated to the stacking chairs, or even the restricted-view window-seats, or worst of all, the floor – usually an indignity faced only by latecomers. The imbalance in Tony’s hearing puts him on the right and me on the left, as we look down the table. Between us, from week three onwards, is the hot seat, to be filled with a succession of volunteers – well they are more or less volunteers – each of them following our earlier examples and presenting a talk on a piece of political philosophy of their choice, thereby determining the syllabus for all their peers. These BCL students, or sometimes MPhil or BPhil students crossing over to us from other Faculties and Departments, are a source of unending amazement to both of the seminar’s convenors. ‘That was really very good, wasn’t it Tony?’ ‘Yes, that was really very good.’ This is how it goes between us after the students have drifted away; this is how it goes almost every time. When I think of Tony now my first thought is always of him right there in the Wharton Room, cupping his hand close to his ear and leaning forward across the table so that he can pick up every little word from that quiet student who sits at the back. Or suddenly becoming animated, his eyes going into twinkle overdrive, as a new thought occurs to him that he just can’t wait to communicate. At these moments it is not just Tony’s enthusiasm that carries us along. He also has a way of
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encapsulating, so economically yet so expressively, the motivation and the mood of whatever we read. I am the one to pick over the propositions, quibbling with the brave student in the hot seat. Tony is the one to bide his time and then to move us on with a well-timed restatement of the problem, or a completely novel objection. I am usually the one to identify the known problems with what we have been reading; he is usually the one to identify the unknown ones. But he is always working with the students in this, always making his ideas seem to follow naturally for theirs. He is an exceptionally generous interlocutor, always looking for a grain of truth, however small, in every student’s remark, however outlandishly misconceived.
The seminar is one of Tony’s natural habitats; it is where his relationships with students often begin. Yet the relationships rarely end there. Tony has a way of making each student feel especially prized, an anointed one, almost adopted by Tony. It is easy for these feelings to develop, for students to come to think of him not only as their eagle-eyed and twinkly-eyed teacher, but also as their mentor and guardian angel. Both Annalise Acorn and Tom Dimitroff, for example, recall how important it was to them that it was Tony who presented them at their respective degree ceremonies in the Sheldonian Theatre. As Regius Professor of Civil Law, presentations of BCL students were ex officio for Tony; but they were rarely experienced as ex officio by the students concerned:
I was more than surprised [writes Tom Dimitroff] when Professor Honoré appeared standing next to me in the Sheldonian Theatre in full academic dress. He said absolutely nothing to me. A moment later, another graduate (whom I did not recognize) and I were each holding one of his fingers as he walked us up the central aisle. The ceremony was over before I could quite grasp what had happened. I remember running to thank him and then stopping. Perhaps I was shy
- feeling it would be too presumptuous to think that he would actually have remembered our exchanges from the previous year when I had
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not be any less crystalline: ‘Yes, but all the same, try another way.’ There goes the chapter, I used to think, and yet not with the kind of disappointment that ought to accompany failure. No, more with the kind of pride that accompanies being taken seriously, being held up to the right standards. The economy, directness, precision and finality of the Honoré critique was a compliment, a sign that one was regarded as up to the job. And it was set against such a backdrop of warmth, generosity, and support that one could not possibly take it amiss. ‘Both rigorous and generous’, as Annalise Acorn says of her evidently similar experience as an Honoré protégé. Any progress I made as a research student in that early and conspicuously naive phase of my project was owed to this deft style of supervision, which encapsulated Tony’s wider style as a teacher. There we had it in microcosm: the remarkable depth and breadth of the Honoré mind combined with the remarkable straightforwardness and decisiveness of the Honoré intervention combined with the remarkable ease and charm of the Honoré encounter. And again the illusion was maintained throughout all of this, with no sign of strain, that one was not really being supervised as a probationer doctoral student so much as ‘brought on’ as a young colleague with one’s first set of spurs already earned. ‘We shouldn’t publish all of our ideas,’ he once said tactfully in response to a patently unpublishable paper of mine, ‘or we shall have nothing left to talk about.’ And then suddenly one’s spurs, the first set, were indeed earned, and one had indeed become a younger colleague, and one had Tony to thank for this and even more of Tony’s support and inspiration to look forward to. His recommendations, from what I have heard, are just like his supervisions. Evidently he made his verdicts on one’s particular strengths and weaknesses very plain. No mincing of words, no gratuitous aggrandisement. But the utter straightforwardness of it all, the economy, the definiteness, evidently commanded attention and respect, and meant more to the reader – more even by way of support for the
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candidate – than what were perhaps the suspiciously superlative hoorays of many other referees. I have learnt from this myself – students be warned! – but somewhat regret the passing of a style of reference in which one could describe another as, say, ‘overzealous but more than usually promising’ (I make this up as an imagined Honoré formulation) and have that taken to be high praise. Or have the parting words ‘I thoroughly recommend A for the job’ taken to mean, well, that one thoroughly recommends A for the job. How many of us, at least in the last generation or two of academic debutantes , benefited from having Tony tell it like it is and, being Tony, having his telling-like-it-is trusted as a balanced account of one’s worth? I think there are quite a few of us. Niki Lacey tells of the large debt that she owes to Tony, even though she was never formally a former student of his. She writes affectionately:
I don't think I really came across Tony as a BCL student, funnily enough. But when I went back to UCL to my first job, I used to teach Roman Law (yes, really: I had studied it as a student because it meant getting to be taught by a very clever, though sadly alcoholic, professor called Tony Thomas, and in a very small class). And to try to enliven my Roman law teaching, I went along to the very scholarly Roman Law Group which Tony Thomas had started and which Andrew Lewis continued after his death. It met quite regularly – maybe once or twice a term – and was really high-powered: Peter Stein from Cambridge often came; Peter Birks; and, of course, Tony Honoré. It was just fantastic for me: my first experience of that kind of small, intellectually intense discussion group. And it was incredibly egalitarian. They treated me – a complete neophyte whom it was clear had no intention of becoming a Romanist nor any aptitude for doing so! – the same as each other. I even wrote a paper (on specificatio I think) for one of the sessions. But best of all, we used to go for dinner to Bertorelli’s on Charlotte St afterwards and have lots of informal chat. Tony was unbelievably supportive to me.
No need to be an official Honoré student, then, to be an unofficial Honoré find. No need to take his course to be on his books. Niki goes on to recall one of those characteristic Honoré
