Sir Donald Neil MacCormick, 1941-2009
[Note: I have removed from public view the video/song for this entry.]
My father-in-law died Sunday, a little less than a year after being diagnosed with inoperable stomach cancer. His name was Neil MacCormick; he was sixty-seven years old.
It’s hard to decide what to say first about him. If you search his name on the internet, you will learn first that he was a legal philosopher and jurisprudential scholar at the University of Edinburgh for over 35 years; that he wrote a few shelves’ worth of articles and books about legal topics both theoretical and practical; that he was knighted in 2001 for his contributions to the scholarship of law; that he was a leading light (and apparently a cohering unit) in the Scottish Nationalist Party, of which his father was a founder; that he served as a Member of the European Parliament from 1999 to 2004; that he held numerous chairs and offices at the University of Edinburgh, drafted the Constitution of the European Union (he was more disappointed than any of us knew, I think, when the Constitution failed to be adopted) and had a deep influence on Scottish, British and European politics and on the generations of lawyers, judges and politicians who were his students, an influence that will probably continue long after his death.
You will learn that he had a wall full of honorary degrees.
You will learn that his 1978 book Legal Reasoning and Legal Theory “answers many of the Dworkinian critiques of the Hartian conception of law, and it is seen by some as showing a middle ground between the two.”
If you are a philosopher of laws, you understand what that means. If you are like me, you are not a philosopher of laws.
You could know him a long time, however, and not know any of those things about him. That’s not to say that you would mistake him for just another bloke at the pub–he never pretended to be anyone other than who he was, and who he was was a man with a limitless curiosity and an intellect so powerful it seemed to have its own gravitational pull, neither of which he could have disguised had he tried. But you would not know that he had met with princes and prime ministers or that conferences were organized in foreign countries to discuss his life’s work. You would not know that, up to his death, he played a crucial role in determining Scotland’s relationship to the other countries in the UK and that his ideas and the force of his own personality are likely to continue to influence the future of Scotland and the UK as that future evolves into the present.
The first things you read about him on the internet would be among the last things you would find about him from just meeting him.
What you would probably sense first about Neil, if you stopped to articulate it to yourself, was that he never gave the impression, at any time you were with him, that he was living anything other than a complete life at that very moment.
You never detected ruefulness or regret in Neil; he found great joy in whatever he was doing at the time and whoever he was with, did not “compartmentalize” himself into Neil-at-work and Neil-at-play. He played the pipes the way he wrote his books the way he took his walks the way he drank his whiskey the way he held his grandchildren: You never got the sense that he wished to be anywhere other than where he was at that moment, and at that moment he was with you.
He rarely looked at his watch.
Because of that singular quality, wherever he went he made deep and lasting friendships. And he went a lot of places–New York, Washington DC, Finland, Sweden, Australia, South America, the Highlands, Brussels, Canada, Luxembourg, and, in the spring of 1998, Austin, Texas.
***
In January 1998 I was a second-year law student at the University of Texas, and I was late registering for that semester’s classes. One of the components I needed to graduate the next year was a seminar, and the ones that looked most interesting were filled. Finally I punted and chose almost at random: “Law, State and Sovereignty.” It was taught by a visiting professor from the University of Edinburgh, which I mentally pronounced with a hard g at the end. I may have thought he was from the Valley.
My memories of “Professor MacCormick” are vague, having been subsumed by a decade of memories of Neil. I remember that the class had maybe 8 or 10 students, only one of whom, Chad McCracken, a Yale graduate who was pursuing his J.D. immediately after having earned his Ph.D. in philosophy, knew anything about the professor or had the kind of background necessary to appreciate the material. Chad was deeply engaged with the substance of the class; you got the impression that he’d been waiting his entire academic career for the chance to take this class.
As for the rest of us, we just politely . . . observed. We didn’t know what the professor was talking about, but it was clear that the professor certainly did, and that was good enough, or at least it was for me. On the elevator to the heights of intellectual supremacy, I get off well short of the penthouse suite, but sometimes I get distracted and miss my floor just listening to the other people on the elevator. That’s what it was like listening to Neil and Chad. They left the rest of us far behind at the first sentence–the topics were arcane and at the highest levels of philosophical abstraction; I used to play a private game in my mind in which I’d try to spot the verb in Neil’s sentences–but the performance was scintillating to watch. Sometimes one of the other classmates, sometimes I, tried to participate by formulating a question in what I’m sure sounded like baby talk, and Neil’s response was always enthusiastic, never dismissive. He was unfailingly warm, welcoming and expansive to his students. All of us (other than Chad) were lost, but none of us, I’m sure, ever left the class feeling like an idiot.
If it had ended there, well, it would have ended there. I enjoyed his class and got the chance to think and write about some matters that interested me, such as what a “nation” is, how a national identity is formed, what role language plays in shaping that identity. But I can’t say that he would have been one of my most influential professors. He was a very kind man. His Scottish accent was pleasant. I enjoyed listening to him talk. I just didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.
But a couple of weeks before the semester ended he announced that we were all invited to a party he’d be having on Sunday, May 3. Some other faculty members will be there, he said. And my daughter will be coming to visit. . . .
I was planning to go, then not planning to go. Finals were underway; I didn’t need to go to a wine brunch on a Sunday morning this time of year. It sounded fun; it sounded tedious. My only clean shirt was wrinkled. I asked Chad if he was going. He was equally noncommittal. Somehow we wound up going together. I gave him a ride in my little black Mazda pickup. I wound up selling that pickup a little over four years later, in Houston, when Janet and I decided we needed something more practical to haul around Neil’s one-month old grandson.
***
He was a rotten driver. His relationship to the physical world was fraught. He misjudged the length of the strap on his glasses, dropping them lens first onto the table-top time and again. He set his wine glass down on non-existent surfaces. He bumped into things and crashed into things and often had a bandage on his scalp. He fell off ladders. One of the clearest memories I have of his seminar is when he reached into this shirt pocket for something to write with and came out with one of those flat, tapered pens with a plastic spiral cord attached to it, the kind of cord whose sole purpose is to keep people from walking away with such pens. I felt sure there was a story there, but he simply launched into his discussion of that day’s topic, waving the pen about, the plastic cord whipping and wrapping about his hand. Neil probably never realized he’d stolen the bank’s (or the library’s or the post office’s) pen. (I envisioned him walking out the door wondering why he felt such tugging resistance from the pen, the circulation desk creaking away from its moorings, the receptionist buzzing for security . . . .)
It’s no mystery, then, why his sense of humor was so broad. He laughed uproariously at puns and physical farce, loved the Flashman novels. Some of the memorials published on the internet note his “dry” sense of humor. I never saw that, or maybe the term has a different meaning in Britain. A dry sense of humor is often exclusive–in that dryness there’s a joke at someone else’s expense, over someone else’s head. Droll understatement, except of the mock kind, was not Neil’s style. He wanted everybody in on the joke, especially when the joke was on him, as it often is when you’re the only man in a houseful of women. Neil was married twice and had three daughters.
Neil’s list of honors and awards is long, but like any such list, it assumes a prominence disproportionate to its significance in giving a portrait of the man. He enjoyed the awards, I think–though not at all immodest, Neil did enjoy the limelight more than he would perhaps voluntarily submit, just as he took a childlike pleasure in opening presents, and he reportedly didn’t like being bested in Scrabble (though I never had the pleasure of besting or seeing him bested in Scrabble; few did.) He enjoyed the attention, but I think he knew they couldn’t be taken seriously as the measure of a life’s work. It was the work itself and the life itself that mattered. The honorary degrees and titles were often just a matter of being in the right place at the right time, being a member of a certain club or clique and having your turn come around. His turn came around a lot.
When he was named to the Queen’s honors list for a knighthood, he was genuinely conflicted. His father, John MacCormick, had founded the Scottish Nationalist Party in 1928, and Neil had carried on his father’s work toward a dream of an independent Scotland. In fact, Neil’s father had famously sued the queen in 1952 on the basis that she had no right to call herself Queen Elizabeth II because Scotland, unlike England, had never had a Queen Elizabeth I. If she was going to be the queen of Scotland as well as of England, MacCormick argued, she’d have to pick another name or start over as Queen Elizabeth I. (The court disagreed, ruling, in effect, that she was the queen and could call herself whatever she damn well pleased.) Now, nearly fifty years later, he was being asked to kneel before this same queen (it was actually Prince Charles who performed the ceremony) and accept an honor from her (“Kneel, Sir Neil,” we joked.) In the end he chose to accept the honor, realizing that (i) he was being recognized not by the queen but by those many students who had passed through his classroom and risen to positions of power throughout Britain and (ii) it would be silly and self-aggrandizing not to.
But the awards were just window dressing. As for the life of public service he lived and the scholarly works he produced, he is being justly celebrated in the newspapers today by his colleagues in politics and academia across Europe and elsewhere. But to his daughters–Janet, Morag and Sheena–and his grandchildren, Thomas and Rona, all of whom had to share Neil with the world, that isn’t Neil either, or at least not the part that mattered. Those books and articles, those lectures, those impromptu parties on afternoons when somebody was always dropping by the house and seemingly not leaving, those trips back and forth between Brussels and Edinburgh, Strasbourg and Edinburgh, everywhere and Edinburgh, were just something Dad/Granddad did between bagpipe-playing sessions or games of Pooh-sticks on the bridge over the little stream in the park across the road from his Pentland Terrace house. Though it was sometimes hard for those closest to him to share his view (“When are these people going to go home?”), to Neil, I think, all these things were part of the same festival of life. Why make false compromises? Why choose, when you can have it all at the same time? He was never jaded, remained fascinated by the world and all its contents; if there was any printed matter within arms reach, he couldn’t help picking it up and reading every word of it and then sharing with you what he’d learned (and he remembered everything he’d learned; his knowledge of history, politics and literature was as deep as it was broad, and it was very broad, in paragraph not outline format. None of us are sure that even Neil had a count on how many languages he could speak proficiently.) He had great generosity of spirit; he extended the courtesy of assuming that you were as interested in the world as he was. He was always engaged, with something in particular and with everything in general at the same time. Manned space flight and the glimpse of a heron, or a poem about a heron, were equal cause for wonder. In a world where it’s common to find a person who will take in a stranger but curse mankind generally and another person who espouses the virtues of humanity but will be casually rude to a busboy, Neil believed that man was essentially good and that every individual was worth meeting and worth knowing. It wasn’t just that he was capable of talking to anybody; he wanted to talk to everybody. And sooner or later they all wound up in his book-stuffed house, drinking wine and talking politics, and sooner or later Neil would break out the bagpipes and blow the roof off the place.
Between the time he was diagnosed with cancer and his death less than a year later, he finished the fourth and final volume of the series of books he had committed to writing several years earlier. He saw the reissuance of his father’s memoir about the founding of the Scottish Nationalist Party, a party whose banner Neil would pick up after his father’s early death and take all the way to the newly established Scottish Parliament. He talked to his grandchildren weekly on Skype. Last fall, he was delighted to be invited to the premiere of a film dramatizing the taking of the Stone of Destiny, including the part his father played in that escapade that became a modern parable of Scottish identity. It was as if life was determined to throw as many rewards his way as was possible in the time he had left. He took them all gratefully and without apology. He didn’t have to choose; he could have it all, the books, the whiskey, the law, the Scottish hills, the honors, the tiny sailboat Skua he bought for five pounds and in which he puttered around the waters near Cairnbaan, the adoration of his daughters and grandchildren. He didn’t have to choose, so he didn’t. He bumped into a lot of things and never met a rug he didn’t trip over, but he lived a life of uncommon grace.