Tony Honoré

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A. M. (Tony) Honoré (1921) is a British lawyer and jurist, known for his work on ownership, causation and Roman law.

Honoré was born in London but was brought up in South Africa. He served in the army during the Second World War and was severely wounded in the Battle of Alamein. After the war he continued his studies at the University of Oxford, where he has lived and taught for the last fifty-five years. Between 1971 and 1988 he was Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford; though retired from his Chair, he teaches seminars in Jurisprudence for the BCL jointly with John Gardner.

Honoré was a close associate of H. L. A. Hart. They jointly wrote Causation in the Law (Oxford, 1st ed. 1959, 2nd 1985) in 1953-8 and Honoré had some influence on Hart's The Concept of Law (Oxford, 1st ed. 1961, 2nd 1994). A number of his philosophical papers are collected in Making Law Bind (Oxford, 1987) and Responsibility and Fault (Oxford, 1999) and his contributions to legal philosophy, which range widely, include sixteen books and more than a hundred articles published over the last six decades.

Honoré is an honorary Q.C. and Bencher of Lincoln's Inn, a member of the British and Bavarian Academies and of the International Academy of Comparative Law. In South Africa, where he made a contribution to the setting up of the new Constitutional Court in 1995, his standing has been recognised by the award of honorary degrees from the Universities of South Africa, Stellenbosch and Cape Town. He has delivered the Hamlyn lectures, the Blackstone and H. L. A. Hart lectures, the J. H. Gray lectures at Cambridge and the Maccabaean lecture in Jurisprudence at the British Academy. Two Festschrifts have been published in his honour.