André Hoekema (1940–2020)

Abstract

I first met André on Saturday, September 1st, 2001. I visited him and his beloved wife Yolanda at their home in Bickerseiland, Amsterdam, after attending the inaugural MARE Conference organized by Maarten Bavinck. I saw him for the last time on Sunday, December 1st, 2019 in his nursing home at Haarlem, thanks to the kindness of his brother Jan, his friends Theo Konijn and Trudi Frankhuizen, and my old friend Erik Weiffenbach. I assured him I was going to return in the spring of last year, but the pandemic prevented me from fulfilling my promise. Unfortunately, he passed away on November 16th, 2020, so I am left with only these hesitant words to honour an outstanding scholar, mentor and friend. Since the Commission on Legal Pluralism is a fairly young and small academic community with close intergenerational ties, I see no reason in providing a detailed account of André ́s scholarly achievements. I will only refer to those related to his engagement with Latin American legal anthropology. Fortunately, professor Rob Schwitters has already written an obituary underscoring his contributions to legal sociology and anthropology, his role as concerned citizen, and his humanist approach to higher education.1 It will be enough to remember that André studied law and sociology at Utrecht University, where he obtained his doctorate in 1972 with a dissertation on petty crime in the ports of Rotterdam. He then lectured for five years at the Free University of Amsterdam. In 1978 he started his forty-year career at the University of Amsterdam. There, he taught Sociology of Law and Legal Pluralism to generations of law students and social scientists, and between 1984 and 2014 graduated nothing less than 28 PhDs. As professor Schwitters reminds us, André was a member of the pioneers that in the 1970s sowed the field of sociology of law in The Netherlands. Given the prevailing division of labour between legal sociology and anthropology at the time, he focused his research on transgression and sanction, bureaucratic decision-making, alternative forms of governance, and changes in formal regulatory regimes. Afterwards, under the influence of the perspective of legal pluralism and a sense of global justice, he became keenly interested in the livelihood of indigenous peoples, particularly in Latin America.2 As part of this human, political, and academic concern, Hoekema contributed in several fields. First, he published influential works widely used in the legal anthropological debates of the region and in the pleas for recognition and autonomy put