Walter Murphy, Author and Princeton Political Scientist, Dies at 80
Walter F. Murphy, a leading constitutional scholar whose otherwise sober, writerly résumé was spiced with commercial fiction, including a bestselling 1979 novel, “The Vicar of Christ,” died April 20 in Charleston, S.C. He was 80.
The cause was cancer, said his wife, Doris Maher Murphy.
Professor Murphy taught in the politics department at Princeton for 37 years, and from 1968 until his retirement in 1995 he was McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, a chair whose first occupant was Woodrow Wilson.
By most accounts he was a revered figure on campus. One of his students was Samuel A. Alito Jr., now an associate justice of the Supreme Court, who sought out Professor Murphy to be his adviser for his senior thesis, on the highest court in Italy, known as the Constitutional Court.
“He was quite a significant political scientist, one of the pioneers in comparing the work of supreme or constitutional courts in different countries,” Justice Alito said in a telephone interview Friday.
Professor Murphy wrote a number of books on the intersection of politics and law, including “Elements of Judicial Strategy” (1964), which used internal Supreme Court documents to illustrate how justices cajoled and wheedled one another in attempts to form majority coalitions on cases, essentially arguing that judges cannot help being policy-oriented.
His magnum opus, “Constitutional Democracy: Creating and Maintaining a Just Political Order” (2006), was an exhaustive study of the kind of government prevalent in Europe and North America that Professor Murphy called a hybrid — a melding of pure democracy, in which the people rule themselves, and a constitutional government, which distrusts the majority’s “benevolence toward those who are ‘different’ from or compete against them.”...
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The cause was cancer, said his wife, Doris Maher Murphy.
Professor Murphy taught in the politics department at Princeton for 37 years, and from 1968 until his retirement in 1995 he was McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, a chair whose first occupant was Woodrow Wilson.
By most accounts he was a revered figure on campus. One of his students was Samuel A. Alito Jr., now an associate justice of the Supreme Court, who sought out Professor Murphy to be his adviser for his senior thesis, on the highest court in Italy, known as the Constitutional Court.
“He was quite a significant political scientist, one of the pioneers in comparing the work of supreme or constitutional courts in different countries,” Justice Alito said in a telephone interview Friday.
Professor Murphy wrote a number of books on the intersection of politics and law, including “Elements of Judicial Strategy” (1964), which used internal Supreme Court documents to illustrate how justices cajoled and wheedled one another in attempts to form majority coalitions on cases, essentially arguing that judges cannot help being policy-oriented.
His magnum opus, “Constitutional Democracy: Creating and Maintaining a Just Political Order” (2006), was an exhaustive study of the kind of government prevalent in Europe and North America that Professor Murphy called a hybrid — a melding of pure democracy, in which the people rule themselves, and a constitutional government, which distrusts the majority’s “benevolence toward those who are ‘different’ from or compete against them.”...