Mr Eugenides brings the sad news of the death of the great jurist and former SNP Euro MP at the terribly young age of 67:
In an earlier incarnation, he was a regular inspiration to those of us who battled through jurisprudental texts trying to make their heads from their tails; even though I had to make do with his books and articles rather than lectures or seminars, he was blessed with the gift of all great teachers for rendering complex ideas simple enough to penetrate even the most hungover of minds.
Certainly he was one of the smartest men I ever met; God knows he must have doubled the mean IQ of the room every time he wandered into an SNP meeting.
As an undergraduate, I relied heavily on his work Legal Reasoning and Legal Theory: a work which I believe contains the painfully accurate observation that jurisprudence amounts to ‘peddling in the shallows of philosophy’.
Despite the limits of the discipline, Neil MacCormick cast a grand shadow on his discipline and will be greatly missed.
