Professor Tony Honoré
Academic lawyer, wounded at El Alamein, who inspired Mandela to create a constitutional court
PROFESSOR TONY HONORÉ, who has died aged 97, was Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford and a Fellow of All Souls who inspired Nelson Mandela to establish a constitutional court in post-apartheid South Africa.
Antony Maurice Honoré was born in Golders Green, London, on March 30 1921. His parents parted company when he was four, and he and his sister Jasmine went to live with grandparents in Transvaal, South Africa. Aged eight he was sent to the Diocesan College in Rondebosch, Cape Town, where he excelled at drama, was good at sport and emerged with the best academic record of his generation. He was studying at Cape Town University when war was declared in 1939.
He soon volunteered for the South African Infantry and, after training, was sent to Egypt. Almost immediately after the first shots of the Battle of El Alamein, his platoon was hit by German artillery fire. He was horrifically wounded: his right ear hung by a shred (he suffered lifelong loss of hearing), his face was scarred and he had shrapnel and bullets lodged in his body that could never be removed. He came close to death in a Beirut hospital. He credited the man in the adjoining bed for saving his life by the simple expedient of repeatedly telling him to hang on.
Having recovered from his wounds, he went up to New College, Oxford, on a delayed Rhodes Scholarship. In 1948, now married, he took a post as a lecturer at Nottingham University, and a year later he was poached by Queen’s College, Oxford, where he became a Fellow. He remained an active member of the university for seven decades.
When he first arrived in Oxford, he encountered a law faculty that was crusty, aloof and in need of urgent reform. Honoré was later credited as being instrumental in modernising its outlook. A man whose shyness had been misconstrued as arrogance in his youth, he did not seek to dominate his classes, but rather listened, then responded with incisive points that cut to the heart of any issue.
He was blessed with a crisp style of exposition, and his interventions were invariably laced with humour. From his seminars, students (many of whom went on to become leading academic and practising lawyers) would invariably pick up three or four unmissable opinions.
His main specialism was Roman Law, but he ranged into several other fields. Appointed Regius Professor of Civil Law and Fellow of All Souls in 1971, after six years at New College, he was equally well regarded for his expertise in jurisprudence, the philosophical underpinning of Tort, and the philosophy of law. His work is cited under 14 different headings in the current Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. He spoke five languages and was an authority on comparative legal systems.
Honoré was notably lacking in pomposity. Elected Acting Warden of All Souls in 1986, he recalled a lesson he had learned at El Alamein from Montgomery: always listen, always ask, always seek opinion. A keen Liverpool supporter, he was proud of the fact that he was (as far as he knew) the only member of All Souls in his time who watched Match of the Day.
In 1990, when receiving an honorary degree from Cape Town University, Honoré delivered a speech about the role of law post-apartheid. When Nelson Mandela heard what he had said, particularly about the potential make-up of a constitutional court, he took up Honoré’s suggestions, which were enshrined in the country’s new legal framework.
Honoré was delighted just before he died to receive a copy of the sixth edition of his definitive book on The South African Law of Trusts, first published in 1966.
In later life he established a happy domestic routine with his second wife Deborah, whom he married in 1980. The two loved a game of bridge accompanied by boiled eggs on Sundays – and a large whisky on summer evenings in their garden. Right up until his death he could be spotted out and about in Oxford, full of vigour.
He had been obliged by Oxford precedent to retire in 1987, the year he was made a QC. But a further 30 years of part-time teaching would follow: he was still taking classes in jurisprudence and theory in the autumn term of 2017.
Honoré’s predecessor as Regius Professor of Civil Law, David Daube, described him as “a genius. And a very clever genius at that.”
At the age of 96 Honoré was involved in a car accident, knocking over an eight-yearold boy. It was, he told his family, the worst thing that had happened to him since Alamein. Fortunately the boy quickly recovered, but the ensuing court case and dangerous driving conviction clouded Honoré’s last years.
He is survived by his daughter and son from his first marriage to Martine Genouville (dissolved 1978), and by his second wife Deborah, née Duncan, and two stepdaughters.