October 2007

RICHARD ERICSON, BA, MA, PhD, LittD, FRSC

To the great loss of the risk community, and to the wider circles of criminological and social theory, Richard Ericson died in early October. To those of us fortunate enough to know him well, he was not only a brilliant scholar, but a loyal, generous, self-effacing and kind friend with a wonderfully wry sense of humour. His untimely death is a tragedy that has affected many of us deeply.

Richard spent most of his career in Canadian universities, particularly the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto. Between 1993 and 2003 he was Principal of Green College and Professor of Law and Sociology, University of British Columbia. Prior to that he was Director of the Centre of Criminology and Professor of Criminology and Sociology, University of Toronto. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and founding co-editor of The Canadian Journal of Sociology. From January 2004 he was Professor of Criminology and Director of the Centre for Criminology and Fellow of All Souls College which he left at the beginning of 2005 to again become Director of the Centre of Criminology at the University of Toronto.

While he has many publications in other fields dating back to the mid 1970s, those of us working on risk know him best for his major contributions to our understanding of risk in criminal justice and the insurance industry. Policing the Risk Society, which he published with Kevin Haggerty in 1998, is likely the most important book written on risk in criminology. Like all of his work, it was meticulously researched, grand in scale, timely and innovative. It drew together Beck's grand theory of the risk society and the more nuanced analysis of the governmentality literature while at the same time mapping out the evidence from a major fieldwork study of policing in action.

More recently, with Aaron Doyle and Dean Barry he produced the magisterial Insurance as Governance in 2003, which is the first large scale sociological analysis of insurance as the industry that not only shapes much of the financial world, but that directly or indirectly governs most fields of everyday life. Based on detailed empirical work, as ever with Richard, it mapped out just how the rationalities and techniques of insurers shape the 'risk society'. While Insurance as Governance is perhaps the key reference book for sociologists of insurance, his Uncertain Business (written with Aaron Doyle) and published in the following year mapped out the variability of insurance and, perhaps most important, laid to rest the mythology that insurance is simply an actuarial domain. Most recently, Richard published Crime in and Insecure World, in which his analysis of risk and uncertainty led into an understanding of how crime and insecurity have become central but dangerous themes in the governance of life.

In addition to his many other extraordinary talents, Richard Ericson was a gifted administrator. He transformed Green College into a renaissance centre of learning where scholars from many disciplines and all over the world were able to study, share ideas and attend almost daily presentations, seminars and discussions. No-one who spent time there will forget the open, vibrant and eclectic place of scholarship that Richard made it into.

Richard leaves behind his partner Diana and son Matthew, and a very large circle of friends and colleagues who will miss him more than he would ever have imagined.