Joseph Raz facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Joseph Raz
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Raz in 2009
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| Born | 21 March 1939 |
| Died | 2 May 2022 (aged 83) London, England
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| Alma mater | Hebrew University of Jerusalem Balliol College, Oxford |
| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Legal positivism Perfectionist liberalism |
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Main interests
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Legal and political philosophy |
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Notable ideas
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Perfectionist liberalism |
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Influences
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Influenced
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Joseph Raz FBA (Hebrew: יוסף רז; 21 March 1939 – 2 May 2022) was an important philosopher from Israel. He studied law, morals, and politics. He was a strong supporter of legal positivism, which is a way of understanding how laws are made and what they mean. He was also famous for his idea called perfectionist liberalism.
Raz spent most of his career teaching about the philosophy of law at the University of Oxford in England. He was connected with Balliol College. Later, he also taught law part-time at Columbia University Law School in the United States and at King's College London. In 2018, he received the special Tang Prize for his work on the Rule of Law.
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Life and Education
Joseph Raz was born in Mandatory Palestine in 1939. He finished his first degree in 1963 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He earned a special law degree called a Magister Juris with top honors.
Later, he went to the University of Oxford in England to get his advanced degree, a DPhil. His teacher there was H. L. A. Hart, another very famous philosopher. Raz had met Hart earlier and impressed him by finding a small mistake in his ideas. Hart then encouraged Raz to study at Oxford. Raz finished his DPhil in 1967.
Teaching Career
After his studies, Raz went back to Israel to teach at the Hebrew University. He taught in the law and philosophy departments. In 1971, he became a Senior Lecturer.
In 1972, he returned to Balliol College at Oxford. He became a Professor of Philosophy of Law at Oxford University in 1985 and stayed until 2006. From 2006 to 2009, he was a Research Professor. In 2002, he also started teaching at Columbia Law School in New York. From 2011, he was a research professor of law at King's College London.
Joseph Raz passed away on May 2, 2022, in London. The Oxford Law Faculty said he was "one of the last remaining giants of jurisprudence and philosophy."
Philosophical Ideas
Joseph Raz was a student of H. L. A. Hart. He played a big role in continuing to develop legal positivism. This idea suggests that laws are valid because of how they are made, not necessarily because they are morally right. Raz also helped edit a new version of Hart's famous book, The Concept of Law.
Raz's first book, The Concept of a Legal System, was based on his doctoral work. Another important book, The Morality of Freedom, won two awards. In this book, he developed his idea of perfectionist liberalism. This idea suggests that the government can help people live better lives by promoting certain good values.
Raz had unique ideas about how laws work. He believed that legal commands are "exclusionary reasons." This means they tell us what to do and also tell us not to think about other reasons for acting. He also developed the "service conception" of authority. This idea says that people can benefit from an authority's decisions only if they can understand those decisions without having to re-think the same problems the authority was supposed to solve.
These ideas supported Raz's argument for legal positivism, especially the "sources thesis." This thesis states that to figure out what a law is, we should only look at social facts (like how it was passed), not at moral arguments.
Many people thought Raz was one of the most important legal philosophers of his time. He wrote and edited twelve books. In his later work, he focused more on political philosophy and how we make decisions. In moral theory, Raz believed in value pluralism. This means that there are many different good values, and sometimes these values cannot be easily compared or measured against each other (they are incommensurable).
Raz's work has even been used by the Supreme Court of Canada in important legal cases. Many of his students also became important philosophers, including Leslie Green, Timothy Endicott, and John Gardner.
Awards and Recognition
Joseph Raz received many honors for his work.
- In 1987, he became a Fellow of the British Academy.
- In 1992, he became a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
- He received honorary doctorates from the Catholic University of Brussels (1993), King's College London (2009), and Hebrew University (2014).
- In 2005, he won the International Prize for Legal Research 'Hector Fix-Zamudio'.
- In 2009, he received a Vice-Presidency Award from the Law Society of University College Dublin.
- In 2018, he received the important Tang Prize in Rule of Law from Taiwan.
In 2000–2001, he gave the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at the University of California, Berkeley. His lectures were titled "The Practice of Value."
Books
- The Concept of a Legal System (1970; 2nd ed., 1980)
- Practical Reason and Norms (1975; 2nd ed., 1990)
- The Authority of Law (1979; 2nd ed., 2009)
- The Morality of Freedom (1986)
- Ethics in the Public Domain (1994; rev. pbk. ed., 1995)
- Engaging Reason (1999)
- Value, Respect and Attachment (2001)
- The Practice of Value (2003)
- Between Authority and Interpretation (2009)
- From Normativity to Responsibility (2011)
See also
In Spanish: Joseph Raz para niños
