Stephen Pendaries Kerr

1944 - 2024

Kerr, Stephen Pendaries

Nov 10, 1944 - Jul 15, 2024

STEPHEN PENDARIES KERR, who died in Tulsa on July 15, 2024, at age 79, was an international legal scholar of strong Catholic faith, whose passion was European history. Immensely proud of his Scottish and Spanish-New Mexican family heritage, Professor Kerr grew up in Tulsa and earned a bachelor's degree and law degree from the University of Oklahoma, a graduate law degree (LL.M.) from George Washington University, and also pursued further postgraduate study at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Boston and at the Hague Academy of International Law in the Netherlands. Early in his career, he practiced law in Washington D.C. He also became an adjunct professor of public international law and human rights. A romantic and royalist at heart, he developed a novel legal theory about how the Habsburgs, the former ruling family of Austria-Hungary, might recover their purely private properties that were confiscated after World War One. The Habsburg family was sufficiently impressed with his ideas that they hired him as a legal advisor, to develop a case that was taken to the European Court of Human Rights in the late 1980s. If that was his finest hour, he also worked for other formerly reigning European royal houses and received several European knighthoods and honors, and a grant by the Lord Lyon of Scotland of Ensigns Armorial as the Baron of Ardgowan. A gentleman of wide learning and encyclopedic knowledge, Stephen Kerr was comforted in his past years of ill health by family and friends and by his robust religious faith, which never wavered.

In lieu of flowers, friends my honor Stephen Kerr with memorial donations to the Tulsa Knights of Columbus.

Services will be on Friday, July 19th, at Holy Family Cathedral, in Tulsa. Rosary 9:30 am and Mass of Christian Burial at 10:00 am.

Fitzgerald Ivy Chapel, 918-585-1151. www.fitzgeraldfuneralservice.com