Obituaries
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John Owen Stone AO was a legendary leader of the Commonwealth Treasury, serving as secretary from 1979 to 1984 following his role as an intellectual driving force as deputy secretary from 1971 to 1978.
He was born in 1929, the elder of two sons of a farmer and a primary school teacher. His childhood was spent in the Western Australian wheat belt. On moving to Perth at age 12, John attended Perth Modern School, where contemporaries included Bob Hawke, Rolf Harris and Maxwell Newton.
He graduated with first-class honours from the University of Western Australia in 1950, majoring in mathematical physics, and served as president of the students’ association. While there he met Billy Snedden, who two decades later would be Prime Minister William McMahon’s treasurer, and with whom Stone would work as treasury deputy secretary.
In 1951, John was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship. He initially enrolled for a physics degree at Oxford, but switched to economics, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. He joined Australia’s Treasury, initially in its London office, in 1954. The same year he married Nancy Hardwick, a biochemical researcher, and they would have five children.
In the 1970s and much of the 1980s, Australia was mired in rigid industrial frameworks, high tariffs, and bureaucratic overreach that threatened to choke growth and innovation. John’s push for deregulation, sound fiscal policy, and labour market reform helped steer Australia away from economic stagnation.
As a distinguished economist, public servant, and later a Senator, he brought rigour and clarity to debates on economic policy. His tenure as Secretary to the Treasury from 1979 to 1984 was marked by a steadfast commitment to fiscal discipline and market-driven solutions, earning him respect as one of Australia’s great conservative minds.
Stone was the only former head of the treasury to enter politics. He served as a National Party Senator for Queensland from 1987 to 1990, having been part of the Joh for Canberra campaign which had as its organising principle the anointing of Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen as prime minister. He was the Senate running mate to Sir Joh’s wife Flo Bjelke-Petersen.
Stone joined the Senate in 1987 as part of the Joh for Canberra campaign. In 1990, he resigned from the Senate to contest a seat in the House of Representatives, but failed to win. He reneged by nominating to return to his Senate seat before withdrawing, bringing his meteoric political career to an end.
He co-founded the HR Nicholls Society, which pressed for the deregulation of industrial relations laws, and the Samuel Griffith Society which concerned itself with states’ rights. His legacy challenges us to continue advocating for policies that empower individuals, reduce regulatory burdens, and foster a vibrant, competitive economy.
He died aged 96 and is survived by five children.
Read full obituary here.
Richard Fallon Jr was born in Augusta, Maine on 4 January 1952. On graduating from Cony High School in Augusta in 1970, he joined Yale University for his BA in History, which he earned in 1975. Richard arrived at Wadham College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar in 1975 to read for his BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. He then attended Yale Law School 1977-80. Before entering teaching, Richard served as a law clerk to Judge J. Skelly Wright and to Justice Lewis F. Powell of the United States Supreme Court.
Richard was a pillar of Harvard Law School since joining the faculty as an assistant professor in 1982, was promoted to full professor in 1987, and was the Story Professor of Law and an Affiliate Professor in the Government Department.
Internationally recognized as a leading scholar of constitutional law, constitutional interpretation, and legal philosophy, he authored dozens of important works in these fields, and just recently completed his latest book, The Changing Constitution. He also served as co-author on leading casebooks and treatises, including Hart and Wechsler’s The Federal Courts and the Federal System. Colleagues around the world benefitted from his engagement with them at workshops and conferences, and particularly his generosity in providing lucid and detailed comments on their work.
He was a beloved teacher, having twice won the Sacks-Freund Award. He also regularly taught a highly popular course on American Constitutional Law for students in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Over his many decades in the classroom, he modelled excellence, curiosity, respect, and humility for his students, which is why so many of them remain devoted to him even decades after graduating.
Although Richard was serious about his work, he managed not to take himself too seriously. He expected a lot of himself and those around him, yet was also eager to listen to, and learn from, others. Even amidst earnest discussions, his wry sense of humour would often make a quiet appearance.
Read full obituary here.
James Daniel O'Flaherty served as a public policy figure at think tanks and on the U.S. Senate staff, and was an expert on South Africa and U.S. foreign trade.
Dan was born in Chicago on November 4,1942 to James C. O'Flaherty, a scholar of German philosophy and history at Wake Forest University, and Lucy Maupin Ribble, an accomplished painter. He grew up in Winston Salem, NC.
Dan won a scholarship to Williams College, Massachusetts, majoring in government and history, later serving on its board. He arrived at Oxford in 1965 as a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, later earning a doctorate at Harvard and teaching for a year at The University of the South at Sewanee.
He was recruited by Senator Frank Church as a senior research analyst. Dan contributed to the Church Report on democratic reforms to U.S. intelligence agencies. His work on Capitol Hill led to an appointment at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in NYC, as a senior fellow specializing in national economics with a concentration on Wall Street, and then to a position at The Group of 30, focusing on international monetary and economic policy.
Dan served as Vice President of the National Foreign Trade Council (NFTC) in D.C., while also directing the U.S.-South Africa Business Council. His work included U.S.-China trade relations, Vietnam normalization, and commercial relations with the former Soviet Union. Dan was a key figure in the Rhodes Scholar Alumni Association, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of The Cosmos Club.
Read full obituary here.
It is with great sadness that we mark the passing of the Honourable Gérard Vincent La Forest, former Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada.
Born in Grand Falls, New Brunswick in 1926, Justice La Forest went to the University of New Brunswick to study law and graduated with his BCL in 1949. He was called to the bar of New Brunswick shortly after, and named a King’s Counsel in 1968. Awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, he continued his studies at Oxford University, where he earned a BA in Jurisprudence in 1951 and an MA in 1956. He also completed an LLM in 1965 and a JSD in 1966, both at Yale University.
Following a short period in private practice, Gérard served in the federal Department of Justice before embarking on a teaching career, notably as Dean of Law at the University of Alberta. He returned to government in 1970, serving as Assistant Deputy Attorney General of Canada until 1974 and later a member of the Law Reform Commission of Canada for five years.
Justice La Forest was appointed directly to the New Brunswick Court of Appeal in 1981 and elevated to the Supreme Court of Canada on January 16, 1985. He served on the Supreme Court for more than 12 years, retiring on September 30, 1997.
“My colleagues and I mourn the loss of Justice La Forest — an exemplary jurist whose compassion deeply informed the Court’s decisions on issues that touched the lives of all Canadians,” said the Chief Justice of Canada, the Right Honourable Richard Wagner, P.C. “As a distinguished appellate judge, legal scholar and public servant, he brought unmatched intellect and experience to the Supreme Court of Canada. His eloquent judgments, spanning many areas of the law, have left a profound and enduring legacy in Canadian jurisprudence. He will be remembered with great respect and admiration.”
Read full obituary here.
It is with great sadness that we mark the passing of Bruce Stewart KC, who passed away peacefully after courageously facing a long and debilitating period of illness.
A New Zealander, he came up to Oriel in 1975 as a Rhodes Scholar to read for a BCL. During his 2 years at Oxford, he played rugby and squash for the college, as well as playing cricket for OUCC and the Authentics, although he never got a Blue.
Upon successfully being awarded his BCL, he returned to Auckland to pursue a career in law. Bruce was a brilliant legal mind, and was widely respected and admired for his deep love for the law.
Read full obituary here.
It is with great sadness that we have learned of the passing of Neil Huxter, at the age of 91.
Born in Bombay, Neil studied at Diocesan College and subsequently University of Cape Town. He arrived at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1955 to study English, and was a writer by profession.
We were saddened to hear that Bryan died on 23 May at the age of 68, surrounded by his family, wife Joanne, four daughters and their partners, and one grandson.
After graduating from the Luther College at the University of Regina in 1978 as the first student in Religious Studies, Bryan arrived at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1979. He returned to Luther College as a professor in 1989 and was appointed Dean in 1995, a role he served until 2005. He later became President in 2010, a role he served until 2020. Bryan’s vocation always went beyond the job title, no matter which one he held.
Bryan served his community with unwavering energy and leadership, and he will be missed deeply.
We were grieved to hear that Leslie Epstein died in Brookline, Massachusetts at the age of 87.
Born in Los Angeles to a family of film makers, Leslie left California for an undergraduate degree at Yale. He arrived at Oxford in 1960 to study Anthropology. Initially aspiring to write plays, he later pursued Theatre Arts at the University of California in Los Angeles and eventually returned to Yale for his doctorate in Playwriting.
He published thirteen works of fiction, along with reviews and essays in the Globe, the Times, and many other publications. His best known novel, King of the Jews, has become a classic of Holocaust Fiction that has been published in eleven foreign languages. His teaching career, meanwhile, was often the more prominent role to many who knew him. He began teaching in New York at Queens College, where he met Ilene Gradman, whom he married in 1969.
He was the director of the Creative Writing Program at Boston University for thirty-six years, mentoring several prize-winning authors. He had a rare gift for spotting a story’s flaws and guiding writers he mentored through “that mystery of taking what you had put together and making it stand on its own two feet,” said Jhumpa Lahiri, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who had studied with him at BU. “He could diagnose a weakness in a way that, honestly, felt miraculous, and I don’t use that word lightly,” she said. “That’s the kind of lesson that lasts you for your whole life. Because of that, he will remain my teacher for as long as I live and as long as I write.”
Leslie augmented his writing critiques by playing Bach concerto recordings in his classroom, assigning students to watch Ingmar Bergman movies on weekends, and suggesting museum visits to strengthen their artistic foundations. “He was a terrific observer of the world and his mind was always churning,” said his son Theo, who added that those closest to his father sometimes noticed a hint of a smile as a thought formed. “He was delighting himself and couldn’t wait to share it, and then he’d find just the right words that either cracked up the room or made people think in a new way, and quite often elevated their world.”
Read full obituary here.
It is with sadness that we have learned that Justice David Souter, who spent nearly two decades on the United States Supreme Court from 1990 to 2009, died at age 85.
Born in Massachusetts, David spent most of his childhood — and his life — on his family's farm in Weare, New Hampshire. After attending New Hampshire public schools, he matriculated at Harvard University and earned a bachelor’s degree there in 1961, before accepting a Rhodes Scholarship that brought him to Magdalen College, Oxford. Here, he earned a Bachelor of Arts (later promoted to a Masters of Arts degree) in Jurisprudence in 1963, after which he returned to Harvard Law School for a three-year period of study to earn a Bachelor of Laws.
Souter was admitted to the bar and began practicing law at New Hampshire firm Orr and Reno as an associate attorney. He turned to public service in 1968, when he accepted a job as an Assistant Attorney General of the Granite State. Three years later, he was appointed Deputy Attorney General, and by 1978 he was the Attorney General of New Hampshire, the state’s chief law enforcement officer.
His meteoric rise through the profession continued when he was selected to be an Associate Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court in 1978. He would spend the next 12 years on that court, including the last seven as Chief Justice, before then-President George Bush nominated him to serve on the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. He took his seat on the Boston-based court in May 1990, but did not remain there for long and was sworn in in October 1990.
At first, Souter’s output on the court placed him firmly in the court’s growing conservative bloc. However, he made a marked shift towards the center by voting with the court’s liberals, particularly in the 1992 case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey. His decision to keep Roe v. Wade in place led to efforts by the Federalist Society and other right-wing legal groups to ensure that future Republican presidents would choose more ideologically reliable legal activists for court seats at all levels. He would remain in the court’s ideological center during the 17 years he spent there following the Casey decision, though the court’s rightward shift meant he voted with the liberal wing far more than his more conservative colleagues over that time period.
Souter was never entirely comfortable living or working in the nation’s capital. While he remained there during the times of year when the court heard cases, he would always rush back to his home on the Weare, New Hampshire farm where he’d lived since childhood. In both places, Souter was widely known to live an analogue, iconoclastic existence. Upon his retirement in 2009, veteran New York Times correspondent Linda Greenhouse wrote that focusing on those eccentricities meant one missed “the essence of a man who in fact is perfectly suited to his job, just not to its trappings.”
In a statement, Chief Justice John Roberts praised his late colleague as having “served our Court with great distinction for nearly twenty years” and said he had “brought uncommon wisdom and kindness to a lifetime of public service.” Roberts also praised Souter for spending roughly 10 years of retirement as a part-time judge on the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and said his former colleague would be “greatly missed.”
Read full obituary here.