Julius Stone

Born (named Avraham Jehuda ["Abe" in 1911 census] but never used Avraham as name; also had Hebrew name changed because of illness, it is believed, to Binyamin.

First name(s) JULIUS Last name STONE Birth year 1907 Birth quarter 3 Registration month - Mother's last name - District LEEDS County Yorkshire Country England Volume 9B Page 395 Record set England & Wales births 1837-2006

21 Glover Street, Leeds when travlling to NYC on 25 Sept 1931 and same address when sailing Liverpool to Boston 1933. In 34 travelled again to NYC giving address as 112 Chapeltown Road, Leeds.

1937 travelled to Boston, Massachusetts, United States with wife Reca from 27 Miles Hill Grove, Leeds.

2 Feb 1939 departed for Aukland, NZ with Reca and infant, Michael, address was 19 Moor Drive, Leeds 6.

1949 travelling to New York from 27 Gledhaw Park Drive Leeds 7

Professor Stone, A.O., OBE, QC

Julius Stone was Challis Professor of Jurisprudence and International Law at the University of Sydney from 1942 to 1972. He was, and is, recognised internationally as one of the premier legal theorists. His thinking, particularly in the areas of human rights and social justice, profoundly influenced generations of students who went on to make major contributions to the life and culture of Australia, on the Bench, in political life, and in the professions. He died in 1985.

Professor Stone was born on 7 July 1907 in Leeds, Yorkshire, the son of Lithuanian Jewish refugees, and was educated on scholarship at Oxford (BA, BCL, DCL), Leeds (LLM) and Harvard (SJD) Universities. The combination of British and American traditions marked his work throughout. He taught at Harvard, where he was associated with the great American jurist Roscoe Pound, and briefly at Leeds. He was Dean of Law at Auckland University College before being appointed to the University of Sydney Law School.

Professor Stone came to Sydney to assume the Challis Chair in 1942. His appointment was wrapped in controversy driven by the perceived radicalism of his jurisprudential stance, the desire of some to keep the Chair open for candidates in the armed forces, and, it has often been suspected, Stone’s identity as a Jew. Nevertheless Stone was appointed, after a stormy debate waged in the newspapers and in Parliament, and punctuated by the resignations of the Chancellor and two Fellows of the University Senate. Indeed, Stone’s appointment was crucial in the evolution of University governance, reinforcing the primacy of academic judgement, vested in the Academic Board, in appointments.

Professor Stone played a crucial role in transforming Australian legal education and has had an enormous influence on a generation of legal scholars and practitioners. He was very influential internationally, effective in, for example, advocating the ‘hot line’ that linked the leaders of the USA and USSR during the Cold War. The honours he received are too numerous to mention here, but he held long-term Visiting Professorships at Hastings College of Law in California and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Upon his retirement from Sydney in 1972, Professor Stone moved to the University of New South Wales, where he spent a further decade of productive engagement. It was during that time that he wrote Precedent and Law, which was published posthumously in 1985.

Professor Stone’s legacy is very much alive in our commitment to rigour in scholarship, breadth and theory in legal education, and concern for human rights and social justice. Even though we may all differ over the answers, the questions Professor Stone was asking – about the role of judges, the significance of policy in judicial interpretation, the place of human rights in law – are still very much with us. Professor Stone’s own drive, the importance of the issues with which he grappled, and at times the limitations of those around him meant that his career at Sydney was not unmoved by controversy. Controversy often surrounds those who make things happen.

Professor Stone’s restless and inquiring spirit is perhaps best captured in a favourite quotation, from Rabbu Tarphon, cited by his biographer, Leonie Star:

‘It is not for you to complete the task, but neither are you free to desist from it.’

Stone was, and knew he was, a gifted intellectual. If you ask why he was impelled into his enormous, restless, output and why honours and accolades were so important to him, the reasons are not hard to find. His family had come as poor migrants from the Baltic to Leeds in England. He was a scholarship boy whose natural gifts rescued him from the dark satanic mills. Such were his later triumphs at Oxford and Harvard that soon he was rumoured to be successor to Pound as Dean of the Harvard Law School. It was not to be. Only subsequently was it discovered that his applications for academic preferment were blighted by referees inflicted with the anti-Semitism of the 1930s. Harvard's loss became Sydney's gain. After a short interval in Auckland, Stone was appointed to the Sydney University Law School to which he would devote the greatest part of his career.