Professor Richard Maidment

Political scientist and pioneer of American Studies at the Open University

Richard Anthony Maidment, political scientist: born Calcutta 24 September 1944; Lecturer, Department of American Studies, Keele University 1970-83; Lecturer, Department of Government and Politics, Open University 1983-97, Professor of US Government and Politics 1997-2003; married 1969 Susan Elman (one son, two daughters; marriage dissolved 1993), second 1997 Geraldine Tausig (two stepdaughters); died Denver, Colorado 10 August 2003.

Richard Maidment confounded stereotypes. He was a scholar, a bon viveur and a cosmopolitan. He built his reputation on his elegant and insightful accounts of the American political system and in particular on his ability to explain judicial decision-making in the US Supreme Court.

In his later years he dedicated his time to creating academic partnerships between the Open University, where he was Professor of US Government and Politics from 1997, and universities in the United States. Despite his encyclopaedic knowledge of the US, he did not immerse himself in books. He was gifted with an extraordinary memory, which he combined with an inner wisdom. And he learned by looking.

Richard Maidment was born into an Anglo-Indian family in Calcutta in 1944 and came to Britain in time to go to grammar school in Beckenham, Kent. As a student at the London School of Economics, he came under the influence of William Letwin, an international authority on US constitutional law and its impact on the economy. Maidment learned that the Supreme Court could only be understood through an understanding of how judges deliberate and reason. Judges should be evaluated as lawyers, not as social critics. Letwin's strictures stuck.

After graduate school at the University of Kent at Canterbury he was appointed to the American Studies Department and the David Bruce Centre for American Studies at Keele. He quickly established a reputation as a witty teacher, who insisted on self-enclosed readings of judicial decisions.

He was sometimes mistaken as a conservative. He argued, controversially, that the Supreme Court's decisions upholding racial segregation at the end of the 19th century made sense in legal terms. He was appalled by America's racial practices, but put the blame squarely on legislators, not judges. Similarly, in his The Judicial Response to the New Deal: the US Supreme Court and economic regulations 1934-36 (1991), he contended that some of the federal agencies created to alleviate the Great Depression were conceptually and constitutionally flawed.

In 1983 he moved to the Open University. He welcomed the opportunity to bring area studies to the widest possible student audience. Although his scholarly interest was focused on the Supreme Court, his real love was for the United States as a whole. To understand US politics, you had to understand its history, its economy and its diverse culture. He pioneered American Studies and, later, Pacific Studies at the OU. He edited some five volumes, all of which reflected his eclecticism.

Maidment was in his element at the Open University. He understood that students learn just as well by seeing things as by reading them. So he not only wrote and produced highly readable textbooks but made a number of documentaries, screened on both US and British television. He was in his element when he made these films. They enabled him to encapsulate and convey the energy of American life. His documentaries on Jewish Americans and Japanese Americans reflected his own empathy for the immigrant experience. He tended to tell of success rather than hardship. This was not because he was oblivious, but because he preferred happy endings.

He had a razor-sharp mind. He had no time for the mumbo-jumbo found in some academic writing. When he wrote about politics, he asked stunningly simple and obvious questions. He was a mensch and he approached politics as a mensch. He gave the highest accolades to political figures who demonstrated warmth, even when human frailty lurked. Clinton, with all his peccadilloes, was his kind of guy. George W. Bush was decidedly not.

Maidment was compulsively hospitable and generous. Unsurprisingly, this warmth is reflected in his work. While he understood that systems matter, he was more interested in the people than the systems. When he wrote about the United States, his understanding of human nature and his extraordinary travel schedules (he crossed the Atlantic at least once a month) gave him insights that devotees of archives seldom display.

He was a cosmopolitan in other respects too. He was well known f or his elegantly tailored designer suits and his vast collection of shirts and ties. His knowledge of the US political system was almost matched by his ability to recall what was on the menus of the great restaurants of the world. Hotel concierges and head waiters always seemed to know his name. But, more impressively, he knew theirs.

Robert Garson