Remembering William Twining
by Francis Mading Deng
The news of the passing of Professor William Twining on Thursday, October 9, 2025, was not unexpected, as he had been suffering from an aggressive cancer for months. His passing can therefore be viewed as a relief from agony. And yet, it is difficult to accept that William is no longer with us. But that is the destiny everyone will eventually go. The enduring meaning of life is the virtues of one’s life to be rewarded in everlasting life to follow, and what one has done in this world, for which one will be remembered. It is in this context that I would like to share with due humility my personal reflections on my late teacher, mentor and friend, William Twining.
It is of course an audacious undertaking for a student to write a tribute about his professor, particularly a towering international personality as William Twining.His career as a law teacher began immediately after studying Law at Oxford University, when he was appointed lecturer at the University of Khartoum in 1958. After his term at Khartoum University, he taught law at the University of Dar es Salam in Tanzania, formerly Tanganyika, where his father had been the Governor-General during British rule. After Dar es Salaam, Twining took the position of Dean of the Law Faculty at Belfast
Professor Reymundo Gama Leyva of the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico (ITAM) in his October 12 obituary, ‘In Memory of William Twining’, gives an excellent overview of Twining’s distinguished academic career that spanned more than sixty years. He notes that Twining played a pivotal role in transforming legal education, with major contributions in the fields of jurisprudence, evidence, and the globalisation of the study of law in a cross-cultural perspective. Twining’s impact extended beyond legal scholarship and included his roles as a teacher, a mentor, and an architect of diverse collaborative projects, as well as an institutional builder.
Twining’s jurisprudential focus was on legal realism, specifically the works of Karl Llewelyn, a leading figure in the American Realism Movement, which argued that law is the product of social and economic forces rather than abstract rules and principles. Within that normative framework, he aimed to explore the intersection of law and empirical research, emphasising the importance of understanding law beyond doctrine to incorporate social factual realities in a specific context. He and Professor Robert Stevens in fact co-founded their series on ‘Law in Context’, in which they edited more and published numerous books. His edited volume, Human Rights: Southern Voices, in which I was honoured to contribute a chapter with three others, Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, a fellow Sudanese from the North, Yash Ghai, a Kenyan of Indian descent, and Upendra Baxi, from India, illustrated his commitment to reach out to Southern scholars on issues of global concern. The theme of globalization certainly continued to be one of the central areas of his professional interest.
My aim in this tribute is personal, focusing on my reflections about William Twining as a man whose support had a transformative impact on my professional life. Even here, I must stress that I do not view myself as an exceptional beneficiary of his intellectual, academic, and moral support for his students and colleagues, which is widely acknowledged to be globally reaching.
I first met William Twining when he joined Khartoum University in 1958, the year I entered the University as a law student. Although I learned later that he had newly graduated from Oxford University and was recruited as a lecturer at an early age, only several years my senior, he had a distinguished bearing and a pronounced presence and was popular among the students, some of whom were his age-mates. In addition to enjoying his classes in Torts and Jurisprudence, I found exceptional support from him and another British lecturer, Oliver Farran, in the innovative exercise of conducting field work in gathering information in customary law during my vacations in the court of my father, the Paramount Chief of the Ngok Dinka. That was an initiative which the Islamic Sudanese establishment did not particularly welcome. It however grew and for a long time became institutionalised for students to carry out during their long vacation throughout the country until it was terminated by the Islamisation of the legal system.
Twining mentoring and support for me continued beyond the Sudan, particularly when I was in England, on a postgraduate course to which I was sent in 1962 after graduating and was appointed tutor, which was the first step toward becoming a lecturer. In London, I soon became a victim of unscrupulous political persecution based on the false allegation that I was master-minding South Sudanese rebel activities in Europe during the first North-South civil war. This was compounded by a threat of blindness from a belatedly detected childhood glaucoma. I was ordered to return to the Sudan immediately, ostensibly to face trial with an almost certain outcome. I declined and resigned my university appointment, becoming virtually a refugee.
When Twining learned about my situation, he promptly arranged my meeting with two visiting Yale professors, Quinton Johnstone and Robert Stevens, at London School of Economics, to discuss the prospects of my admission to Yale Law School in the United States. I had a good meeting with the two professors and although it was rather late in the admission process, they undertook to initiate and support my admission to Yale Law School. While consistently lowering my expectations, they eventually succeeded, and I was admitted to Yale Law School in 1964 and continued my post-graduate studies, leading to my obtaining an LLM and a JSD.
In addition to initiating my meeting with the Yale professors, Twining also asked his father to contact me to arrange for us to meet on his visit to London. We met and discussed the details of my situation in addition to my admission to Yale, which Professors Johnstone and Stevens had successfully done. It was at my lowest point, agonising over my health and political predicament, that William proposed that I write my autobiography. I took that as an improbable idea that must have been meant to raise my morale under those trying circumstances. William’s wife, Penelope, who probably detected my despondence, asked her husband to allow time for ‘the child’ to grow up. Twining explained that his idea was not a recording of accomplishment but a documentation of the cross-cultural path I had traversed in my education.
Twining had in mind my African rural background and an education in Southern Christian-dominated schools, on to a Northern Muslim school, and further up the educational ladder to the University of Khartoum. He also had in mind the two summer study tours I took to Germany in 1961 and 1962 on a program of students exchange in which I was the only South Sudanese. On the first visit, I was a member of the delegation and on the second, I was its leader, a case which Twining cited in his 2019 book, Jurist in Context: A Memoire, in which he covered his Khartoum experience. He wrote, to my flattering surprise, that I was “the leader of the whole class, not just the few Southerners.” But there I was, with contrastingly dim prospects for the future. Even with his moderated explanation that he wanted me to document what he saw as a noteworthy cross-cultural experience, I still felt that his suggestion was a flattering way of encouraging me by raising my morale under my depressing conditions.
But William was serious about his proposal. While I was at Yale, he came as a Visiting Professor and joined my doctoral committee members to offer useful guidance in my research project. He also persuaded some of my professors to lend their support for my writing an autobiography. I eventually succumbed. He and I began recording conversations in which he interviewed me about my life. Eventually, I got fully on board with him and continued working on my autobiography over the years that followed. Twining continued to offer his guidance even from a distance.
The project eventually ended with my 2021 voluminous book, Invisible Bridge: An African Journey Through Cultures, to which Twining wrote the Foreword. The book covers my background in rural Sudan, from a family with generations of Paramount Chiefs, through my education, which ended with my obtaining my doctorate, after which I joined the Human Rights Division of the United Nations Secretariat in New York, and concluded with my return home to be with our dying father. I dedicated the book to William Twining in recognition of all he had done for me, including his persistent encouragement of the book.
We envisaged the book to be the first of three volumes. The second was to be my national service in Sudan, as Ambassador to Scandinavia, Canada, and the United States, and Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, after which I served in the newly independent country of South Sudan as the first Permanent Representative to the United Nations. The third volume was to be on my international service in various positions, including as Secretary-General’s Representative on internal displacement and Under-Secretary-General and Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide. Although I have not yet produced the two volumes as envisaged, the themes of my national and international service have been partially covered in my various publications over the years.
Another area in which William has had a lasting impact on my life was his persistently urging me to archive my materials and even contacted some people to help me in that endeavour. As destiny would have it, in the process of archiving the materials of a deceased American diplomat by the Hoover Institute of Stanford University, the diplomat’s widow, a friend, mentioned my work to the North African and Middle East Archivist, who took a keen interest in archiving my materials. He came to our Woodstock home, and we spent days filling 75 boxes of materials.
Knowing that William was now bed-ridden at a rather late stage of his illness, I took pictures of some of these boxes and sent them to Penelope to share them with him as the culmination of his long urging. Penelope graciously acknowledged receipt with a word of congratulations. By a remarkable coincidence, she arranged to have me invited to the inauguration of the Twining-Llewelyn Fund at the Perelman Centre in Brussels, Belgium, where William’s archive will be deposited. Although William was unable to attend the event, he watched it by Zoom, and according to a message from a family member, “that meant a great deal to him”.
This tribute has focused on my personal and scholarly association with William Twining, but my case is only one of many people around the world that William profoundly touched. I have always been a great admirer at the way he combined his scholarly and professorial academic focus with reaching out to broader areas of human rights and comparative cross-cultural perspectives on various legal and related areas. For me personally, it has been a source of great pleasure to see my association with William Twining evolve from a teacher-student relationship to a lasting friendship and partnership, even as our scholarly and professional lives took divergent paths. I recall a visit by William and Penelope to our house in Woodstock, New York, when William took time to play basketball with our very young boys, a small, yet important gesture of the caring and compassionate man he was.
I would like to end this tribute by invoking a traditional religious principle among my people, the Dinka, to which I still hold, despite my conversion to Christianity at an early age as part of the modern education I went through. In addition to their faith in some form of life after death, the Dinka believe in a worldly immortality embodied in a concept known as Kooc e nhom, ‘Standing the head of the dead upright’, which is done through the memory of the deceased primarily by the descendants, relatives, friends and all those one has touched in one’s life. Through the combination of the Christian concept of life after and this notion of worldly immortality, I am confident that while William Twining will be sorely missed, he will remain among us in the memory of the family, friends, colleagues, students, and many around the world.
My wife Dorothy and members of our family join me in praying for William’s soul to rest in eternal peace and may his immediate family, his beloved wife and life partner, Penelope, their children Karen and Peter, and their grandchildren, be consoled by the moral solidarity of their world-wide family of William’s friends, colleagues, and associates, that will share with them the lasting memory of William Twining.