Although he might have been surprised to hear himself described as a ‘transnational jurisprudent’, Peter Fitzpatrick was a model for how a transnational jurisprudent of the common-law tradition might conduct themselves well (McVeigh et al., Reference McVeigh, Genovese, McMillan, Chalmers and Pahuja2021). His exemplarity did not reside primarily in a list of qualities (though one could compile an embarrassingly long list with ease). Instead, it can be found in the way Peter thought and wrote about law from within a humanist tradition, ‘caring for the conduct of law’ (McVeigh et al., Reference McVeigh, Genovese, McMillan, Chalmers and Pahuja2021, pp. 21–35), whilst responding to the obligations created by the imperial history and foundations of modern law. For Peter as jurisprudent, the obligations that this inheritance entails include attending critically to law's authority, tracking its ‘modes of authorisation’ (Dorsett and McVeigh, Reference Dorsett and McVeigh2012, p. 33) and critically redescribing the material formations so authorised, all without transcending law or escaping it through critique. To escape to ‘the political’, for example, would be to disavow responsibility for the lawful conduct of life, and for the forms of practice through which lawful relations take place (ibid.).

This is thinking and writing grounded in responsibility. Peter was fond of recalling the ‘archaic’ spelling, ‘responsability’, because it reminds us that responsibility is, above all, responsive. For him, law, like love (Auden, Reference Auden, Kader and Standford1939/2010; Fitzpatrick, Reference Fitzpatrick2001a), ‘responds’ to the world, in both its fixity and its change. And so too should the jurisprudent. Fitzpatrick's ‘responsability’, emplaced, yet expansive, oriented towards justice, yet attentive to empire, both cleaves to the best and acknowledges the ‘worst‘. Three books written by Peter make this clearer than I could. Each of them appears regularly in my own reading, teaching and writing. Together, the books tell a story of the colonial and post-colonial journey of modern law, its violent institution and stabilisation in the colony (Fitzpatrick, Reference Fitzpatrick1980a); its mythic dimensions (Fitzpatrick, Reference Fitzpatrick1992); and foundation-less grounds (Fitzpatrick, Reference Fitzpatrick2001b). But the archaic spelling gestures as well to the idea that we have forgotten about responsibility altogether, our senses made drowsy by the narrative of progress. In terms that resonate deeply with the argument that Peter makes in Mythology, Norgaard argues that

In the twentieth century, that ‘progress’ took shape in endless growth, carried by the development project. Like its Enlightened parent, the narrative of development ‘makes an expansive claim to exclusive rationality, with its arrogation of a universal and uniform knowledge of the world, and with its affirmation of universal freedom and equality … sets a fateful dimension’ (Fitzpatrick, Reference Fitzpatrick1992, p. 65) for both humanity and for Earth. Throughout this historical trajectory, we find the other, abject, yet resistant (Fitzpatrick, Reference Fitzpatrick2008), ‘constituted’ by modern law, but always in excess, endlessly cast out, but critical to the self-grounding of modern law's authority (Fitzpatrick and Tuitt, Reference Fitzpatrick and Tuitt2003). For Peter, ‘[e]nlightenment creates the very monsters against which it so assiduously sets itself. These monsters of race and nature mark the outer limits, the intractable “other” against which Enlightenment pits the vacuity of the universal’. The other is ‘critical’ because it is only in this opposition that Enlightenment gains content: ‘Enlightened being is what the other is not. Modern law is created in this disjunction’ (Fitzpatrick, Reference Fitzpatrick1992, p. 45).

But behind and beyond the projection, those who people the occident's ‘other’ are, in Peter's hands, never mere objects of scholarship, but among those to whom the ‘responsability’ is owed. And so, although his engagement with modern law is always critical, this is no scorched-Earth jurisprudence in which no green shoots of law may be found – not for Fitzpatrick a critical dialectic and its transcendence, nor a displacement from bad ‘law’ to a good ‘political’. Instead, he always reminds us that ‘Law is We’ (Auden, Reference Auden, Kader and Standford1939/2010): just as there can be no law without community, there can be no community without law. The task of the occidentally trained jurisprudent is to find, and take up, what is good and what is just in occidental law.

And yet, at the same time, Peter's work whispers with each breath that ‘justice is impossible’. The ‘community’ that joins us can also mark a limit, a line of decision, about who is inside and who may be kept out – who must be sacrificed. This community-as-colony can ‘justify elimination’ (Fitzpatrick, Reference Fitzpatrick, with Pahuja, Chalmers and Pahuja2021, pp. 75–88). Peter's early work drew out this genocidal tendency of modern law precisely in the context of the colony and settler-colony, but also in that of the nation state in general. In a piece called ‘Really rather like slavery: law and labour in the colonial economy in Papua New Guinea’, for example, Peter details the neocolonial dimensions of the Australian administration of Papua New Guinea, tracing its structures, including legal structures, to colonial systems of indentured labour, and follows the way in which state-making indigenises an exploitative form (Fitzpatrick, Reference Fitzpatrick1980b). As Brecht remarked, ‘those who are certain to gain by the offering, demand a spirit of sacrifice’.Footnote ¹ The historical and the theoretical are deftly interwoven in that early work to reveal both the technologies of occidental imperial domination and the jurisprudential practices that authorise and sustain them.

Peter often joked that he knew nothing about international law. And yet, in retrospect, it seems that it was always only a matter of time before international law came to know him. The door may at first have been opened by sovereignty – a term central to Peter's work and, as I read him, treated as both technology and concept. In earlier works, sovereignty was positioned as the pivot between history and theory. Later, he showed it to be the pivot between nation and inter-nation. In theoretical terms, sovereignty was for him famously ‘surpassing’ (Fitzpatrick, Reference Fitzpatrick and Evans2012). With this term, Peter was trying to capture the way in which modern state sovereignty had to replicate a theological structure in secular form, fusing two contradictory dimensions without recourse to transcendence, or God. In other words, Peter showed us the way in which sovereignty had to be something fixed and determinate – the avatar of the nation of blood and soil – while continually adaptable to change, to meet and absorb the forces that required its ongoing reconstitution, endlessly ‘surpassing’ both its challengers and itself. For Peter, this surpassing was not so much about power as an intimation of sovereignty as an ultimate ‘nothing’. This ‘nothing’, or ‘incipient vacuity’, as Peter often put it, was where the work of imagination – and resistance – could take hold. This necessarily ‘empty’ dimension revealed that what seemed so powerfully fixed – what could be more fixed than modern state sovereignty after all? – necessarily held within itself the secret that it could always be otherwise.

It was at this point for me that Peter's jurisprudence met international law most explicitly (Fitzpatrick, Reference Fitzpatrick2003). The theological dimensions of a putatively secular law, the need for a transcendent referent to secure modern (international) law's grounds, the false opposition between universality and particularity, the centrality of race and civilisation to modern law's claims to authority – all were yet to become familiar ideas within the canon of international law.

I think it was roughly at this point in the chronology of his work that I became Peter's PhD student. My training until then had largely been in how to take up the office of cosmopolitan bureaucrat, learning the rituals and rites of those who would save the post-Cold War world with free trade and human rights. I began to gain a sense that there might be different traditions available, and different worlds to be made, during my LLM at UBC under the guidance of a dream team for a young scholar of international law.Footnote ² But it was Peter who trained me to think of international law as part of a humanist tradition. And Peter who modelled for me most profoundly the jurisprudent schooled in the ‘humanities inflected jurisprudence of the common law tradition’ (McVeigh, Reference McVeigh and Allen2019, pp. 183–204). For the international jurist, the responsibilities of office in this tradition must be understood as being owed not only to those within a community, but also to those whom the community must encounter, and with whom it must treat. But, against my cosmopolitan training until that point, I learned from Peter that this responsibility is not to save, but to encounter. It is not deific, but mundane. There is no ‘view from nowhere’ (Jasanoff, Reference Jasanoff2005, p. 266).

For me, one element of Peter's interest in international law lay in the absence of an overarching sovereign. The idea of a law that does not transcend maintained its fascination right to the end of Peter's scholarly life (Fitzpatrick, Reference Fitzpatrick, with Pahuja, Chalmers and Pahuja2021). But if international law has no cohering authority, yet we Occidentals struggle to find the ‘inter’, or between. ‘Infused with a negative universal reference’, the ‘between’ itself levitates and threatens to transcend. It seems that we have never been modern (Latour, Reference Latour1993). And the ‘new’ international law, like the ‘new imperialism’ (Eldridge, Reference Eldridge1996), claims to speak on behalf of humanityFootnote ³ (Fitzpatrick, Reference Fitzpatrick2007). But there is no transcendent humanity, no sacred law upon which we can rely. Despite its claims, Europe has no direct line to the gods, not even the god of progress. Several pieces distil these lessons. Most poetic, perhaps, is a piece that Peter wrote in 2014 for the London Review of International Law called ‘Taking place: Westphalia and the poetics of law’ (Fitzpatrick, Reference Fitzpatrick2014). In that piece, Peter engages with the myth of Westphalia as originating both international law and the modern state in order to draw out the recursive relationship of those two forms to each other, and their mutual grounding.

But, even in Peter's revelation of groundless grounds, there is still no Earth scorched of law. For, although international law may be the child of empire, we may yet encourage its oedipal tendencies (Fitzpatrick, Reference Fitzpatrick2006; Reference Fitzpatrick, Johns, Joyce and Pahuja2011). So we were trained by Peter not to have faith in law, but to show fidelity to itFootnote ⁴ – not to solve law's mysteries, but to find in them the ‘generative mythos’ (Fitzpatrick, Reference Fitzpatrick2017) of law's capacity to be other than what it is. We learned that our responsibility as jurisprudents must include an attention to history and to the material, and to have a sense of place. We must be vigilant against the tendency of law to declare itself just, of justice to declare itself right and of community to become colony. Our duty is not to save the other with (our) law, or (our) knowledge, but to meet lawfully with those who live by other laws.

But, lest this sounds rather dry, these abstract lessons were accompanied by more embodied and prosaic practices of training. In the rather liturgical secularity of Peter's supervision, we learned to read slowly and with care. And, after the combative rituals of frank intellectual exchange, ceremonies of conviviality were always held.Footnote ⁵ It was in this combination of the intellectual and the embodied, seriousness and lightness, erudition and humility, that Peter exemplified the jurisprudent who both cares for the conduct of law and was infinitely responsive to those in his care.