Once upon a time, there was François Ost

Yves Cartuyvels, a legal scholar at the Facultés universitaires de Saint-Louis-Bruxelles, described his colleague and compatriot François Ost asa “thinker of the in-between.” A thinker of coherence, a thinker of balance, a thinkerof “connections”—this is how the man to whom the University of Montpellier has just awarded the prestigious title of Doctor Honoris Causa defines himself. This is recognition of an exceptional academic career that this committed and curious Belgian citizen has built, much like one builds bridges. Bridges between law and philosophy, between law and the environment, and between law and literature as well.

Law and Philosophy

It was amid the turmoil of the 1970s that François Ost, a young man from Brussels, enrolled in law school“out of family tradition,” as he confides in an interview titled: François Ost, All Horizons of Law. The grandson of international law professor Charles de Visscher, however, had a “secret wish”: philosophy.  It is to these two disciplines that he would ultimately devote his life,“in an effort to open up the study of law and reflect on its relationship to society,” emphasizes Alexandre Viala, professor of public law at UM, director of Cercop, and sponsor of this honorary degree ceremony. Works suchas What Is the Purpose of Law? or Le droit ou l’empire du tiers , published this year, bear witness to this ongoing desire to decontextualize law in terms of its uses and purposes.

In the early 1980s, with a dissertation in the philosophy of law under his belt—which explored the mythological excesses of legal rationality—François Ost began his career as an educator by becoming a professor at the Faculty of Law at Saint-Louis-Brussels, where he served as dean from 1982 to 1993. He also taught at the European Academy of Legal Theory, which he founded in 1989, as well as in Geneva, at the Collège de France, and at the University of Montpellier, where, in close collaboration with the Cercop, he established the university diploma in philosophy of law in 2002.

Law and the Environment

At the same time, the legal scholar continued his research, giving it a profoundly interdisciplinary dimension that was reflected in the editorial focus of the *Revue Interdisciplinaires des études juridiques*, which he founded in 1978. In it, he develops“a critical perspective, a perspective that is structured, enriched, and sharpened by interdisciplinarity, whether through philosophy, economics, sociology, psychology, psychoanalysis, or ecology,” noted Carine Jallamion, Vice Dean of the Montpellier Law School, during the formal ceremony. Ecology has been a particularly central theme throughout François Ost’s career. The Center for the Study of Environmental Law, which he founded in 1989, offered the very first program in environmental law in French-speaking Belgium.

“In the 1980s, I was part of a generation that—rightly or wrongly, though probably wrongly—believed that social problems had been resolved and were being addressed through the welfare state, but that we needed to recognize another threat: the ecological threat,” says François Ost in the same interview. He then published *Nature Outlawed* or What Future for Environmental Law?

The lawyer also channels this environmental awareness into his civic engagement. He joined the board of directors of Greenpeace, where he served for about ten years before founding, with friends, the Foundation for Future Generations, whose board he still chairs today.“Very often, when you’re in the thick of things, you lack perspective. Conversely, when you’re at the university, you sometimes lack a firm grounding in reality. You see how the bridge between academic expertise and civic engagement can be fruitful for both,” he summarizes when asked about this dual dimension he brings to his work.

Law and Literature

A third pillar underpins François Ost’s intellectual framework: the intersection of law and literature. An“unlikely marriage, or even a dangerous liaison,” as the scholar puts it, who for years would illustrate legal cases with examples drawn from literature. It was ultimately by looking to the United States that he found inspiration in the“Law and Literature”movement, which he brought to the universities of Saint-Louis first in the form of a course, and later through numerous publications. Telling the story of the law, at the sources of the legal imagination, Shakespeare, the Comedy of Law, Faust or the Boundaries of Knowledge and Sade and the Law, are just a few examples of his work on the subject.

Theater is also part of his repertoire, and the play *Antigone Veiled* will give him the opportunity to revisit the issue of the veil and the legacy of this mythological figure of resistance to oppression. More recently, François Ost has continued his exploration of the links between law and literature through storytelling, with the 2019 publication of the collection If the Law Were Told to Me and New Legal Tales in 2021.“To tell the story of the law in order to better understand it, to view it as a culture rather than a technique, to approach it from the perspective of the case and not just the rule—that is my answer to the question ‘Why fairy tales?’”concludes the man on whom the University of Montpellier can now count.