BY MATTHEW W. FINKIN

Philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson died on November 20 at the age of ninety-one. Matthew W. Finkin remembers her and her service to the AAUP below.

Philosophy has lost a luminary. The AAUP has lost a stalwart. I have lost a friend.

In philosophy, one need only glimpse at the Encyclopedia of Philosophy to see the impact Judith Thomson’s books and articles have had. She was, as one obituary writer put it, “one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century.”

Regarding the AAUP, Judy was long a member of Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. She also served on the Council and held both the second and first vice-presidencies. But I knew her best for her work on Committee A.

By the time she came to the committee I had provided staff service to it for some years, but we had never met. I was struck at first sight by her—a slim woman, with closely cropped hair and piercing eyes, who spoke in a vaguely Americanized British-inflected accent, a bit like Katharine Hepburn’s. When she spoke, it was invariably to press a line of questioning, never tendentious but open-mindedly probing for unexamined assumptions or unforeseen consequences. To use the words bear trap in describing her mind would be far too crude as that clunky contraption cannot come anything close to the elegance of the way her mind worked.

During her term of service, I became chair of Committee A and came ever more to rely on her. She took on subcommittee service tackling corporate sponsorship of academic research, for which her MIT professorship added real-world insight; the relationship of institutional review boards to academic freedom; the requirement of background checks for faculty appointments (on which Bob Post and I joined her); and more. She had a keen interest in the issue of the relationship of ideological commitment to faculty selection and the academic freedom implications of faculties that favor or even restrict themselves to the selection of devotees of particular disciplinary schools, and she wrote a classic piece on the issue. Relatedly, she took to the question of academic freedom and church-related institutions following a Committee A subcommittee report on it, focusing on the contemporary meaning of the enigmatic “limitations clause” of the 1940 Statement. When constitutional law scholar Michael McConnell criticized Committee A’s report, Judy thought what he said should not pass without reply and, as I had lent an oar on the report, she invited me to join her. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience but one which I’d not care to repeat as Judy’s intensity, down to the meaning she attached to punctuation, was exhausting.

I came away from that experience with a lived appreciation for the fact that one can have taste, good or bad, in ideas as much as in art, fashion, or food. Our reply to McConnell provoked another prominent legal academic to challenge us. Jordan Kurland sent us the piece and asked if we’d care to follow up. I called Judy and she declined, emphatically. Was it because his arguments were so threadbare? No, she said, because they were so vulgar.

After Judy retired, I sought to see how she was faring. She loved the freedom from institutional commitments, she wrote, “so that you can get some thinking done under less pressure,” but she missed engagement with students, that is those who shared her interests, and, ironically, she simultaneously lamented the lack of “structure,” the very departmental and university commitments she was relieved to leave. “It isn’t that you have nothing to do without them, it’s that your life had a structure and when you retire, it just collapses about you because you don’t HAVE TO DO ANYTHING.” This, whilst she was at work on a book with, as she put it, the “imaginative title” of Ethics.

So to the personal. Judy was close-lipped about her personal life, and I never asked. I came to know that the Jarvis was a corruption of the family name Javits and that over drinks late at night her accent migrated from Locust Valley to the upper West Side. I also learned that her father died of ALS while in her care, which may explain her participation in a brief amicus brief to the Supreme Court by a number of professors of ethics, which came to be called the “Philosophers’ Brief,” advancing a constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide.

When Judy’s term on Committee A ended, Jordan Kurland hosted a celebration of her and asked for written contributions. I have managed to find what I wrote over two decades ago. It is timely still:

When . . . a PhD candidate sets about writing a dissertation on “The Influence of Judith Jarvis Thomson on the American Theory and Practice of Academic Freedom”—and I predict the topic will be taken—our researcher will be confronted with a bewildering wealth of Thomsonia: of memoranda, policy drafts, letters, and critical marginal notes dealing with virtually every issue of historical moment—from conflicts of interest in university research to ideology in faculty selection to sexual harassment and free speech to constraints imposed by institutional adherence to the Sermon on the Mount (also known as the “Limitations Clause”). All of it painstakingly thorough, nuanced, and powerfully reasoned, if sometimes couched in the arcane lingo of British analytical philosophy, of sentences prefaced by “Let us assume straightaway” or “It pays to stress.” Alas, our researcher will not detect all the cups of strong coffee our subject required before a proper Committee A meeting could begin, or the clouds of tobacco smoke—of almost Biblical density—billowing outside the meeting room door whence our subject would repair. But what our researcher will find is how generously Judith Thomson has given of her time and extraordinary intelligence; and of how measurably better not only Committee A nor only the Association, but the American academic community is for it.

. . . Judith Thomson is much more to me than a valued colleague. She is a cherished friend. She is a coauthor (who actually once allowed me a footnote of my very own). And she is the only person in the world who calls me “Dear Boy.”

Matthew W. Finkin is professor of law at the University of Illinois.