John Griffiths 1940-2017
![handle is hein.journals/jlpul2017 and id is 254 raw text is:
THE JOURNAL OF LEGAL PLURALISM AND UNOFFICIAL LAW, 2017
VOL. 49, NO. 3, 251-252 Routledge
https://doi.org/10.1080/07329113.2017.1374005 Taylor& Francis Group
OBITUARY
John Griffiths 1940-2017
I first met John in autumn 1968. He was in his second year of teaching at Yale, where I
was to begin teaching in January 1969. As close contemporaries with similar political ori-
entations and even styles (we both wore sandals and published scathing reviews of
respected senior scholars: John's on Herbert Packer, mine on Max Rheinstein), we bonded
immediately. We both taught torts, but it was my recent experience of a year of fieldwork
on customary law in Kenya and our common interest in sociology of law that was the real
connection. Sociology of law was just emerging, with the founding of the Law and Society
Association and its journal, the Law and Society Review. Yale hosted both the Russell
Sage Program in Law and Social Science, directed by Stan Wheeler (perhaps the first soci-
ologist appointed to a US law faculty), and the Law and Modernization Program, led by
Dave Trubek (who had worked for USAID in Brazil). Both programs brought many excit-
ing junior and senior scholars to the campus for a semester or more.
John's interest in sociology of law and law and development (and perhaps my stories of
Kenya) moved him and his partner Fre to leave Yale for the University of Ghana Law Fac-
ulty in summer 1970 (where I had the pleasure of visiting them). Our friendship resumed
when John returned to teach at NYU in January 1973, although after I left Yale for UCLA
in summer 1974 and he moved to Groningen in 1976, face-to-face contact was limited to
conferences in Europe and the US (aside from a family visit the five Abels made to the
five Griffiths-LePooles in Groningen in 1984, including poffertjes in the town square and
the compulsory visit for Americans to a windmill).
But our intellectual exchanges continued for nearly a half century, most intensely
through the journal African Law Studies. In 1975, when I inherited the editorship from
Arthur Schiller (who had taught me African law at Columbia), I immediately asked John
to be an Associate Editor. Five issues and four years later, I gratefully handed over the edi-
torship to John (while remaining an Associate Editor). He reaffirmed my goal that ALS
should be a vehicle for social scientific, as well as legal, scholarship because an adequate
understanding of law can only be achieved if it is seen as a social phenomenon interacting
with other social phenomena. (John's readers will hear his distinctive theoretical voice in
that early manifesto.) He also expressed a determination to internationalize it. His first
issue (#17 in 1979) admirably advanced both goals, with articles by J.F. Holleman (Neth-
erlands), Simon Roberts (UK), Etienne LeRoy (France) and Peter Sevareid (US). His next
issue announced the transformation of ALS into the Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unoffi-
cial Law, breaking with the geographic limitation to Africa. John defined its theoretical
focus:
[A] 11 those circumstances in which more than one normative order is present within a single
social group ... . The law of the state itself (except insofar as state law specifically concerns
itself with the pluralistic character of the social order) will no longer occupy our pages.
0 2017 The Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/jlpul2017&div=21&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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John Griffiths 1940-2017
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