Tony Honoré is one of the most distinguished South African law academics. His long career – first as a law don at Queen’s College, Oxford then successor to Professor R.W. Lee as last Rhodes Reader in Roman-Dutch law at Oxford – culminated in his appointment to the Regius Chair in Civil Law at All Souls College, Oxford, from which he retired some years ago. His pre-eminence in the fields of Roman law, Roman-Dutch and modern South African law and legal philosophy (his Causation in the Law, with Professor H.L.A. Hart, is still a leading text) is internationally recognised.
His formal retirement by no means signaled an end to his intellectual activity in the areas of law and philosophy, and he marked 60 years as a teacher of law in 2008. The Faculty of Law at Oxford marked this milestone with a colloquium at which a number of eminent lawyers spoke, and the Faculty of Law at the University of Cape Town (at the suggestion of Jeremy Gauntlett, a former student of Professor Honoré and long-serving member of the University Council) was proud to host a similar event in March 2009. Tony and Deborah Honoré attended the Cape Town event, as did fifty leading law academics, practitioners, and judges.
The quality and significance of the formal lectures presented at this gathering was such that Professor Danie Visser (Deputy Vice-Chancellor at UCT) and Professor Max Loubser (another former student of Professor Honoré and member of the Faculty of Law at Stellenbosch University) undertook to edit the papers for publication.
