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Alice Erh-Soon Tay

 

Alice Erh-Soon Tay (1934–2004)

Her scholarly career came to span four decades and comprised more than two hundred publications, government reports, and major public speeches, some written for specialized legal audiences.6 Much of her work, however, went beyond detailed discussion of legal concepts, to embrace social and philosophical concepts as a means to understand the development of legal systems in modern states and how these defined the relationships not only between the state and its citizens, but also between the state and those who were not citizens. For Tay, the state had to be guided by the notion of universal moral obligations and responsibilities that extended to all humanity, a principle reminiscent of Immanuel Kant’s cosmopolitan “right of hospitality” of strangers in a foreign land. Much of her work dealt with situations in which the state had failed its own citizens, revealing a serious moral flaw and the state’s ignorance, willful or otherwise, of its duty to do right by humanity.7 She was not an international lawyer in the sense of studying the laws between states. But internationalism was central to her work, informing her perspective in conceptualizing the legal systems of individual states, as well as the underlying morality upon which each state developed its legal system.8 In 1975 Tay became Challis Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Sydney in Australia, a clear recognition of her standing in the field, and there she established one of the first university courses in human rights in Australia. In 1998, in further public recognition of this work, she was appointed president of the Australian federal government’s Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission.

A. Tay and E. Kamenka, “The Life and Afterlife of a Bolshevik Jurist,” Problems of Communism 19 (1970): 72–79; A. Tay and E. Kamenka, “Socialism, Liberty and Law,” in Liberty and Politics: Studies in Social Theory, ed. Owen Harries (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1976), pp. 81–101; A. Tay and E. Kamenka, eds., Human Rights (London: Edward Arnold, 1978); A. Tay and E. Kamenka, “Law, the Citizen and the State,” in Law and Society, ed. E. Kamenka et al. (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), pp. 1–17. She also used her comparative knowledge of the Russian and Chinese legal systems in a groundbreaking article on law, the citizen, and the state in Communist China: A. Tay, “Law in Communist China—Part I,” Sydney Law Review 6 (1969): 153–172; A. Tay, “Law in Communist China—Part II,” Sydney Law Review 6 (1971): 335–371; A. Tay, “‘Smash All Permanent Rules’: China as a Model for the Future,” Sydney Law Review 7 (1976): 400–423. A. Tay and E. Kamenka, “Beyond the French Revolution: Communist Socialism and the Concept of Law,” University of Toronto Law Journal 21 (1971):109–140; A. Tay, “Soviet Ritualism and Soviet Law,” in Australian Society of Legal Philosophy, Working Paper 36a (1967): 1–11; A. Tay, “The Law of Inheritance in the New Russian Civil Code of 1964,” International and Comparative Law Quarterly 17 (1968): 472–500.

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