Philippe Nonet

Philippe Nonet was a brilliant teacher with a penetrating intellect, who guided generations of students in the study of law and justice. Nonet’s outstanding qualities included a commitment to thinking that is seldom encountered elsewhere. The rigorousness and precision of his approach to texts and to academic exchange made him a force with which to be reckoned. His spirit of inquiry and his faith that such questing actually matters lives on in the work of the many students he inspired.

Nonet was born February 25, 1939 in Liège, Belgium, to Léon Nonet and Hélène Nonet-Reginster, both doctors of medicine.  He earned his law degree, Docteur en Droit, from Université de Liège in 1961. A chance reading of Philip Selznick’s article, “Sociology and Natural Law,” drew him to UC Berkeley to pursue a Ph.D. in Sociology, which he completed under Selznick’s direction in 1966. Appointed Assistant Professor of Sociology at Berkeley the same year, he returned to Belgium on leave to teach at the Catholic University of Louvain (Chargé de Cours Associé, Faculté des Sciences Economiques et Sociales, Université Catholique de Louvain). In 1970 he returned to Berkeley and worked with Sanford Kadish and Philip Selznick to establish in 1972 the interdisciplinary Law and Society program at the Center for the Study of Law and Society, which became the precursor to the graduate Jurisprudence and Social Policy (JSP) Program that was housed in the law school. Nonet was a Visiting Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, in 1971 and Visiting Professor on the Faculty of Law at Bremen University, Germany, in 1981. He was promoted to Professor and joined the Berkeley Law faculty in 1977 with the founding of the JSP program. He continued to offer wide ranging seminars in jurisprudence in JSP and to teach in the undergraduate Legal Studies major until his retirement in 2007.

Nonet’s early scholarship was very much in the tradition of law and society. His 1969 book, Administrative Justice: Advocacy and Change in Government Offices, studied law-in-action through the institutional history and workings of the California Industrial Accident Commission’s worker’s compensation program. Nonet also collaborated with Philip Selznick on major research projects, including Selznick’s Law, Society and Industrial Justice (1970). Nonet and Selznick co-authored the still-influential study, Law and Society in Transition: Toward Responsive Law (1978).

As his philosophical knowledge and interests deepened, Nonet’s jurisprudential scholarship took its distance from, and indeed came to constitute a critique of, not only administration, but also sociolegal studies. His understanding of the Western philosophical tradition shifted focus from Kant and Plato, to include Nietzsche and Heidegger. A series of important articles on such topics as positive law, judgment, and sanction, appeared in the late 1980s and 1990s, followed by articles on “Antigone’s Law” and “Time and Law.” Fluent himself in French and German, and with deep knowledge of Latin and Ancient Greek, Nonet insisted that his students grapple with philosophical works if not in their original tongue, at least with attention to the near impossibility of translating particular words and, more broadly, the attitudes and practices they sought to convey. He continued after retirement to study and to translate not only Ancient Greek philosophy, but also the plays of the Greek poets. Among his later publications appear his own translations of Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles. With these translations he sought to preserve the terseness and sobriety of Ancient Greek in contrast to the “usual verbosity” of modern “poetic” English.  His 2018 Spell of Technique collects some of his earlier essays on great thinkers of the West to reveal the dominion of “technique” – technical rationality – as a threat to human freedom in the modern era.

For decades Nonet taught a core course, Legal Studies 100A, “Foundations of Law: The Quest for Justice,” that prompted many undergraduate majors for the first time to interrogate their beliefs about right and justice. In this class, as elsewhere, he demanded thoughtful engagement. His teaching assistants came to expect that there would come a moment once a semester when he would end class early in response to students’ complacency. And while Nonet occasionally jumped up the stairs of a lecture hall for emphasis, he did not seek to entertain, but to encourage students to consider and question how we think. Despite the moniker “No ‘A’ Nonet” that was coined by some students, his teaching reputation attracted many other students from outside the major who would rise each year to the occasion. Teaching assistants found the class to be indelibly rewarding; his explications of legal institutions and jurisprudential concepts underlie the work of even JSP graduates who did not formally work with him.

To those who did work with him and who completed their dissertations under his supervision on a broad range of topics in the history and philosophy of law, Nonet gave unstintingly of his time and his attention. He seemed to thrive as much as they on interactions in office hours, reading groups, and on what came to be known as the “dissertation trail” in Point Reyes – a hike near his second home in Inverness which offered supervisor and student a perfect combination of nearness and distance for discussing draft chapters! Several of his former students recall how much he brought to their encounters as they walked and talked over shared work. One student noted that not only was Nonet’s thought “untimely” in the best sense, but he embodied Aristotle’s claim for the great-souled: “since only a few things matter to him, he is not likely to be rushed.” Beyond thoughts and works, the things that mattered included appreciation of birds and beauty, of art and music, and of good food and wine.

A beloved teacher in the Law School’s Jurisprudence and Social Policy Ph.D. program and in the undergraduate Legal Studies Department, Philippe Nonet passed away on August 26, 2020, in Oakland, California, attended by his family. A group of his former students, many of whom are now university professors, continue to learn from him via a twice-yearly reading group that also honors his teaching.

Marianne Constable 
2023