Preeminent constitutional scholar and professor emeritus Murphy dies at 80

Murphy joined the faculty in 1958 and was named the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence a decade later. He taught at the University for 37 years before retiring in 1995.

During his career, Murphy’s research ranged from political theory and comparative politics to judicial decision-making and the challenges associated with constitutional democracy.

Murphy’s colleagues and students mourned the loss of a preeminent scholar as they extolled his lasting contributions to his field.

“He was a leading constitutional interpretation scholar of his time who wrote important books on the Supreme Court and American political system and democratic theory,” politics professor Stephen Macedo said. “He spanned the entire spectrum of politics. He brought together many approaches.”

Murphy taught University Provost Christopher Eisgruber ’83 and Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito ’72, whose senior thesis he advised. Politics professor Robert George, who currently teaches POL 315: Constitutional Interpretation, was one of Murphy’s preceptors for the course upon joining the faculty.

“When I was an undergraduate, I thought of Professor Murphy as awesome — both in the sense of ‘magnificent’ and in the sense of ‘terrifying,’ ” Eisgruber, who was introduced to Murphy through his course on constitutional interpretation, said in an e-mail. “His standards were so high, I thought that I could not possibly live up to them.”

After joining the faculty, Eisgruber said that he “began to know Walter as a colleague, and I came to see him entirely differently — as a warm, generous, witty and fatherly figure, a fabulous mentor to young scholars and graduate students.”

Murphy approached his study with a wide view that has lost adherents in an era of specialization.

“What is amazing about Walter’s scholarly career is that he resisted type-casting,” Eisgruber said. “Nowadays, legal scholars specialize in one or another methodology and ignore the others. Walter drew on every strand of constitutional scholarship, be it history, political theory or political science.”

“In political science, he did it all,” said James Fleming GS ’88, a professor at the Boston University School of Law who wrote his dissertation under Murphy’s guidance. “He took several different approaches to the study of the constitution and mastered them all.”

James Garland ’95, a lawyer for the Department of Justice who wrote his thesis under Murphy after taking his constitutional interpretation course, remembered Murphy as “an incredibly exacting editor” who led him to learn more about writing during his senior year than he ever had previously.

“I still rely on his framework for thinking about the constitution, and I use it to this day. He was a force and he will be missed,” he said.

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David Trulio ’95, whose thesis was also advised by Murphy, said in an e-mail that Murphy “was a true teacher in the finest Princeton tradition,” combining “a razor-sharp, inquisitive mind, as well as a down-to-earth and humorous demeanor.”

Politics professor emeritus Fred Greenstein, who was Murphy’s colleague in the politics department from 1973 until Murphy’s retirement, said that “the approach in which he was the great pioneer is that he treated judges as politicians. He showed how they would get other people to write the decision. A lot of people think it is ambiguous language that people impose their own views. He really wanted to know what the constitution meant.”

Murphy authored his comprehensive magnum opus “Constitutional Democracy: Creating and Maintaining a Just Political Order,” which was published in 2006. He co-wrote and co-edited the text “American Constitutional Interpretation” with Macedo, Fleming and Sortirios Barber, a political science professor at the University of Notre Dame.

Murphy was born on Nov. 21, 1929, and raised in Charleston, S.C. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Notre Dame in 1950.

For his service in the U.S. Marine Corps during the Korean War, Murphy received the Distinguished Service Cross, the Purple Heart, a Presidential Unit Citation and three battle stars.

Murphy then taught at the U.S. Naval Academy from 1952 to 1955, earned a master’s degree from George Washington University in 1954 and received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1957 before joining the Princeton faculty.

“He was a wonderful teacher, dedicated professor and citizen of Princeton — and he just loved it here,” Macedo said. “He was very committed to teaching Princeton students.”

“He made Princeton a home for a normative study of the constitution, and I think that inspired his famous course on constitutional interpretation, and that was where his heart was,” Fleming said.

Murphy also differentiated himself from other teachers by moving beyond the world of scholarship.

He authored a three-part novel titled “The Vicar of Christ” in 1979, which eventually appeared on The New York Times best-seller list and received the Chicago Foundation for Literature Award.

Greenstein noted that Murphy was “unusual among academics in that he was devoutly religious and committed to his experience in combat in Korea.”

“He was a very productive scholar and very individual in the way he used intellect,” Greenstein added. “He wrote several works of fiction and turned away from the research approach. He was the leading person and went where there was competition.”

The field has “lost one of the preeminent scholars of constitutionalism and the courts,” Macedo said, noting that “he had many students across the country and around the world ... He’s been one of the biggest influences.”

Fleming noted Murphy’s ability to respect and get along with those who held views different from his own. “He could get along with people who were extremely liberal, or people who were extremely conservative,” Fleming said. “He was capable of gauging the caliber of someone’s mind and their work, even if he didn’t agree with them.”

Murphy was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, received three Fulbright awards, and was granted fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation.

He also became involved in court proceedings at the state level, serving as a member of the Committee on Judicial Conduct for the New Jersey Supreme Court, the New Jersey Civil Rights Commission and the New Jersey Advisory Commission to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.

Murphy is survived by his second wife and two daughters.