One of the first close friends I made after arriving in Manchester in 1967 was Hillel Steiner. In fact, he and I arrived in the University’s Department of Government (as it then was) at the same time, where our offices faced each other across the corridor. We’d exchanged greetings and a few words, and I then met him one evening at a colleague’s house where C.B. Macpherson was the guest of honour. Some time after that Adèle and I ran into Llel (as he is called by those who know him well) and his then wife Miriam at the local movie-house, the Scala in Withington. The four of us went to many movies together in the next few years and spent a lot of time in each other’s company. We went to Paris. We played a game of our own invention called Caractacus Potts. Llel is now one of my oldest friends.
To come to the point of this post… Hillel Steiner has had a distinguished academic career. His work on freedom and justice has earned him a worldwide reputation. Later this year, on 20-21 November, the Manchester Centre for Political Theory (MANCEPT) will be holding a conference in his honour. For further details, see here. And Routledge have just published a festschrift for him – Hillel Steiner and the Anatomy of Justice. Edited by Ian Carter, Stephen de Wijze and Matthew Kramer, the volume includes essays by Jerry Cohen, Michael Otsuka, Joseph Raz and Jonathan Wolff, as well as by the three editors. It also has one by yours truly – on ‘Games and Meanings’ – which started life as a series of posts on normblog.