Obituaries

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.

We were deeply saddened to hear that Joseph Nye died earlier this week at the age of 88. One of the world's most celebrated political thinkers, his ideas on the nature of power in international relations influenced generations of policymakers, academics, and students.

Joseph Samuel Nye Jr. was born in 1937 and grew up in a small New Jersey farming town. He earned his undergraduate degree at Princeton University and arrived at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1958, to read for his MA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics.

Nye developed the concepts of soft power, smart power, and neoliberalism during his six decades as a Harvard professor. He joined the faculty in 1964 after earning his doctoral degree in Political Science, also at Harvard, and went on to become a major force in developing the modern John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he served as dean from 1995 to 2004. 

In the 1970s, Nye attempted to account for the growing influence of new forces, such as multinational corporations, transnational social movements, and international organizations, in global politics. In other words, as he would say in his influential 1977 book, coauthored with Robert Keohane, a framework for “the political analysis of interdependence.” That book, “Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition,” was often referred to as the foundation for neoliberalism. Nye resisted that label, preferring to call himself a liberal realist. But he also found labels in general unhelpful, he told the Harvard Gazette in 2017: “I think pigeonholing of people in theoretical categories stops thinking rather than advances it.” 

It was Nye’s theory of “soft power” that may be his most important scholarly contribution. If his earlier work had attempted to explain the growing importance of interdependence, soft power analyzed the nature of global power itself. In its simplest terms, as Nye wrote in his book “Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power,” the idea was that “if you can get others to want what you want, you can economize on sticks and carrots.”

The idea was crucial to understanding the enduring power of the United States at a moment when many thought it was in decline. “I looked at our military power and our economic power, and I said, there’s still something missing, which is the power to get what you want through attraction and persuasion rather than coercion or payment,” Nye told the Harvard Gazette. Nye’s approach helped to highlight the power of a country’s culture or civic society, and it has been crucial in understanding that power could be measured in more ways than just army divisions and aircraft carriers. 

Nye also put his ideas into practice in government, serving in key U.S. national security roles in the Carter and Clinton administrations and leading a host of transnational policy organizations such as the Aspen Strategy Group, which he helped found. That combination of academic rigor, engagement, and hands-on government service informed and enriched his research and teaching.

Those who knew him best remember Nye as an unfailingly kind, generous colleague and friend who was devoted to his wife, Molly, who died in December, and their three sons and nine grandchildren.

Read full obituary here.

Warren Magnusson (Manitoba and Corpus Christi, 1967) died in Vancouver on April 2, 2025. He is survived by his wife Sharon Walls, daughter Rachel Magnusson, grandson Daniel Magnusson, and brother Denis.

At Oxford, Warren successfully completed a BPhil (1969) and a DPhil (1978), both in Politics. In 1979, he began a remarkable career in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, where he stayed until his retirement and where he was a co-founder of the University’s interdisciplinary graduate programme in Cultural, Social, and Political Thought.

Warren’s DPhil thesis was entitled “Participation and Democratic Theory: The Role of Neighbourhood Government.” The title itself summarizes much of his life’s intellectual project: combining the big questions of political philosophy and theory with the nitty-gritty issues of how we manage to govern ourselves in complex urban environments.

His mastery of the broad history and significance of Canadian local government was demonstrated in his Introduction to City Politics in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 1983), a collection of essays he edited with Andrew Sancton (Quebec and Queen’s, 1968). He also wrote the book’s chapter on Toronto. More than forty years later, these essays remain essential reading for anyone interested in the governance of Canadian cities.

But Warren is best known for his theoretical work, much of which is devoted to undermining the concept of sovereignty by showing how communities of all shapes and sizes can and should govern themselves, rather than being at the mercy of all-powerful states.

Anyone wanting to understand Warren’s intellectual legacy could best begin by reading his 2015 book Local Self-Government and the Right to the City (McGill-Queen’s University Press). In it his most important essays are reprinted, beginning with one first published in 1979. What makes the book especially fascinating is Warren’s 2015 commentary on how he viewed his earlier work and how his thinking evolved since the original time of writing.

Many of Warren’s students have already testified about how his wise individual counsel enabled them to reach their full intellectual potential. Others—including his academic colleagues—have marvelled at his rhetorical skills; in classrooms and conference settings, he could speak extemporaneously (without PowerPoint!) about the most complex of subjects in what seemed like perfectly structured full paragraphs.

Warren Magnusson’s legacy will be admired by his colleagues, readers, and students for decades to come.

Lachlan Patrick MacLachlan died peacefully in his sleep on March 20, 2025, four days after his 97th birthday.

He was predeceased by his wife Jocelyn and is survived by his three sons, three grandchildren, sister-in-law, nieces and nephews in Australia, South Africa and England.

Pat was born in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, on March 16, 1928. He studied architecture at the University of Cape Town (B.Arch.) and then in 1951 was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University. This transformed his life. He took a respectable gentleman's pass in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (M.A.) at Exeter College while playing rugby at scrum half: for Oxford (including on the University's legendary tour to Japan in 1952), London Scottish, Scotland (capped four times) and the Barbarians. On a blind date in 1954, he met Jocelyn Vulliamy and, after a whirlwind romance, married her and returned home with her to Southern Rhodesia.

From 1954 to 1961, he worked as an architect in what is now Zimbabwe and Malawi and played rugby for Southern Rhodesia, Mashonaland, Nyasaland and the Salisbury Sports Club. In 1961, he and Jocelyn and their two young sons emigrated to Canada for him to take up a teaching position at Shawnigan Lake School (whose headmaster was in his college at Oxford). Pat gave up his career as an architect and the world of his birth and family and friends and where he was a national sporting hero to create a new life for his family in Canada. His children and grandchildren are forever grateful.

At Shawnigan, Pat taught mathematics and draughting, coached the First XV, and he and Jocelyn welcomed a third son. His aptitude for organization and his popularity with the students led to his appointment as Assistant Headmaster and, when two successive headmasters left the school, in 1968 he was thrust into the role of Headmaster on a permanent basis. In those years he continued to play rugby: for B.C., the Crimson Tide, Cowichan and the Ebb Tide.

In 1972, he left Shawnigan Lake School and established a successful business in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia as the admissions representative for secondary schools in Canada, Australia, the United States of America and the United Kingdom. He loved his connections with the young people he met. He played a lot of golf and bridge at the Royal Hong Kong Golf Club and for many years from the establishment of the Hong Kong Sevens tournament in 1976 he was one of its announcers.

On retirement and until Jocelyn's death in 2006, he enjoyed very happy years with her on the golf course (shooting his age at 76) and in the house they built in Maple Bay on Vancouver Island. After her death, he moved into Duncan and then to Vancouver, and his last years were spent in the amazingly patient and dedicated care of the wonderful staff at a care home in Vancouver.

Read full obituary here.