In Memoriam - William L. Morison

1920 - 2000

Jeremy Webber
Professor and Dean
Faculty of Law
University of Sydney

Emeritus Professor Morison studied History, Philosophy and Law at the University of Sydney, obtaining First Class Honours in all three disciplines and receiving the University Medal in History and Philosophy. He obtained his D Phil from Oxford in 1951. He was a member of the Bar of NSW from 1944 and a member of the NSW Law Reform Commission from 1968 to 1970. But most significantly, he taught in the Faculty of Law at the University of Sydney for four decades, from 1946 until 1985, retiring as Challis Professor of Law.

I did not have the opportunity to meet Professor Morison. I came from Canada to become Dean at Sydney in 1998, and although I tried on a number of occasions to entice him back to the Faculty, I did not succeed. The most I achieved was to speak with him by telephone.

I did ask many of colleagues, however, on many occasions, about Professor Morison. In fact the most recent of those conversations was within the week before we heard the sad news of his passing. I have to wonder whether this absence of personal connection was meant. I have been forced to get to know Professor Morison through the means that I suspect he would have most preferred - by reading his works.

The published works are primarily in the fields of Jurisprudence, Torts, and Evidence and Procedure. They are remarkable for their precision, clarity and rigour - qualities that I understand were abundantly evident in his teaching - indeed ( I understand - and there are those of you present who would know much better than I) in his life. They are marked by an uncompromising desire to avoid illusions, and by a drive to comprehend law in both senses of that term - a drive to understand law, and to understand it in the totality of its relationship to social affairs generally.

To those familiar with legal philosophy, some idea of the path of Professor Morison's thought can be sketched by the following list of names: Bentham, Austin, John Anderson, Karl Llewellyn, Harold Lasswell and Myres McDougal. The pivotal term in this list is Anderson, to whom, together with his wife Mary, Professor Morison dedicated his book on Austin. Professor Morison was a student of Anderson's, and Anderson's work provides the link between Professor Morison's legal positivism and his empiricism, the link that allowed him both to draw on Bentham and Austin and to engage with Llewellyn and his realist successors. Lasswell and McDougal, the champions of "policy-oriented jurisprudence", were his collaborators. Professor Morison was therefore both classically utilitarian and vigorously modern.

But it is perhaps unfair to describe Professor Morison's accomplishment by a list of those upon whose insights he drew and with whom he collaborated. His own contributions - to our understanding of Austin and of his contemporary relevance, to our understanding of Torts, to our conception of the foundations and operation of public authority in Australian politics and law - were immense. They were marked by a desire to drive the analysis of law (or, I imagine, any other social phenomenon, but Law was Professor Morison's chosen arena) down through each layer of determination, so that one's analysis is grounded as far as possible on defensible and express premises.

The commitment to clarity and exactitude is unrelenting, qualities that I understand were also evident in his teaching and scholarly interaction. It made for the vital and demanding exposition of ideas. Professor Morison's era within the Faculty was a time of passionate commitment, vigorous debates, and immense contribution both in its formation of generations of lawyers and in its intellectual fecundity. For Professor Morison, ideas were worth the struggle to refine and express them, and to impart them with all the rigour they could bear. The ideas he expressed - the ideas that he has left permanently with us - were worthy of the passion he brought to them.

Jeremy Webber
Professor and Dean
Faculty of Law
University of Sydney

April 2000

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