Julius Stone

by Leonie Star

The life of international legal academic, Julius Stone, was marked by distinguished scholarship and recurrent controversy. This intellectual biography combines a study of Stone's work against a background of contemporary legal theory, with a rich portrait of the man as he lived his life across three continents and among shifting social, political and religious attitudes. Born in England in 1907 and educated at Oxford, Leeds and Harvard universities, Stone spent most of his working life as Professor of Jurisprudence and International Law at the University of Sydney. His immigrant, economically-deprived upbringing in Leeds and his early contact with anti-Semitism influenced Stone's lifelong commitment to justice. Through his writings on jurisprudence and international law, and his teaching in major universities, Stone brought into vivid outline his often idiosyncratic, but always intellectual, view of the law. The effect he and his work had on others was extreme - he was either revered o