Tony Weir, translator of Zweigert & Kötz

Tony Weir died on 13 December 2011, as I only just discovered via Juris Diversitas, which reports that Bristol University is holding an event called Tony Weir and his contribution to comparative law scholarship on 11 September 2012 (the event is free but you have to apply).

There is apparently a Times obituary, but that is behind a paywall. However, I found an obituary on the Edinburgh University site at Scots Law News:

Perhaps, however, Tony’s greatest contribution to comparative law, at least so far as the Anglophone world is concerned, is his translation of Zweigert and Kötz’s Einführung in die Rechtsvergleichung (Introduction to Comparative Law), which has had a remarkable impact from the time of its first appearance in 1977. Zweigert and Kötz themselves paid Tony this handsome compliment: “Indeed, one American professor of law who is fluent as a native in both German and English went so far as to say that the translation was better than the original, rare though that is, and acceptable, he was kind enough to add, though the original in this case was.”

There’s a bibliography on that site too. Zweigert and Kötz in either language is a great read.

3 thoughts on “Tony Weir, translator of Zweigert & Kötz

  1. Sad news indeed. I didn’t realise Tony was a Scot and am grateful that, in 1976, after the Zweigert & K

    • Can you remember where he uses ‘eleemosynary’? Was it in connection with French law? It appears to be used in Louisiana, and so if you’d been researching Louisiana you’d certainly have been able to compete.

  2. Not offhand. I don’t have the German volumes any more, but had to return the publisher’s sample copies to my student contemporary who’d originally been offered the translation job – and had turned it down.

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