Louis Henkin | |
|---|---|
| Born | Eliezer Henkin (1917-11-11)November 11, 1917 |
| Died | October 14, 2010(2010-10-14) (aged 92) Manhattan, New York, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Academic background | |
| Education | Yeshiva College Harvard University |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | International law |
| Institutions | |
Louis Henkin (November 11, 1917 – October 14, 2010) was an American legal scholar. He was considered one of the most influential contemporary scholars ofinternational law and theforeign policy of the United States.[1] He was a former president of theAmerican Society of International Law and of theAmerican Society for Political and Legal Philosophy and University Professor emeritus atColumbia Law School. He was until his death the chairman of the Center for the Study of Human Rights atColumbia University. He was a member of both theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences and theAmerican Philosophical Society.[2][3]
He was born Eliezer Henkin on November 11, 1917, inSmolyany, in present-dayBelarus, the son of RabbiYosef Eliyahu Henkin, an authority inJewish law.[1] His mother died when he was two years old while she was helping deal with adysentery outbreak and he and his five siblings were raised by his stepmother.[4] The family emigrated to the United States in 1923, residing on theLower East Side ofManhattan.[1] Henkin grew up speakingYiddish and attended theRabbi Jacob Joseph School, learning to speak English in the process of helping his father mail letters to other rabbinic scholars across the country.[4] He earned his undergraduate in 1937 fromYeshiva College, where he majored in mathematics, by which time he had adopted "Louis" as his first name. He took a chance at applying toHarvard Law School after seeing a fellow student at Yeshiva fill out an application.[4] Once he was accepted he was able to attend with the financial assistance of his sister and graduated with aBachelor of Laws with the class of 1940. After graduating, he served as a law clerk to JudgeLearned Hand of theUnited States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.[1]
Henkin enlisted in theUnited States Army in June 1941 and saw action duringWorld War II in the European Theater in Sicily, Italy, France and Germany. While with a 13-man artillery observation unit serving nearToulon, he was awarded theSilver Star for an incident in which he was able to use his ability to speakYiddish as a means to negotiate the terms of the surrender of a German unit consisting of 78 men.[1] He became a corporal.
After completing his military service, he was a law clerk forSupreme CourtAssociate JusticeFelix Frankfurter. The justices would hold their weekly conference on Saturday, and Henkin would sleep on Frankfurter's couch on Friday nights and would refrain from writing while at the conference in order to avoid the performance ofactivities prohibited on Shabbat. In a 2003 interview, Henkin said that he "did my job as well as I could, observingShabbat as well as I could" and said that he did not know if Frankfurter—who was notShomer Shabbat—was ever aware that Henkin had been sleeping on his couch.[5]
Beginning in 1948, Henkin worked at theUnited Nations bureau of theUnited States Department of State, where he was one of the individuals responsible for theConvention Relating to the Status of Refugees in 1951, an agreement that established the internationally agreed upon definition of what constitutes arefugee and established the requirements for countries to provide asylum to individuals so designated. He left the State department in 1956 to teach for a year atColumbia University on the subject ofnuclear disarmament which became the subject matter for his 1958 bookArms Control and Inspection in American Law. He taught at theUniversity of Pennsylvania starting in 1958, continuing his work that was published asTheBerlin Crisis and the United Nations in 1959 and the bookDisarmament: The Lawyer's Interests, which was released in 1964.[1]
While teaching at Columbia Law School starting in the early 1960s and through the Justice and Society Program of theAspen Institute, Henkin specialized in the development and instruction ofhuman rights law, which he put into practice by establishing the university's Center for the Study of Human Rights in 1978 and creating the Human Rights Institute in 1998. Elisa Massimino, president and chief executive officer ofHuman Rights First, the nonpartisan organization originally formed by Henkin as the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, said that he "literally and figuratively wrote the book on human rights" and that "[i]t is no exaggeration to say that no American was more instrumental in the development of human rights law than Lou".[1]
Written whileRichard Nixon was conducting the American involvement in theVietnam War, his 1972 bookForeign Affairs and the Constitution described the division of responsibility between thePresident of the United States and the Congress in conducting foreign affairs and military action, exploring how the executive branch had achieved a great measure of control despite the fact that the Constitution grants the legislative branch the power to declare war. As the practice of foreign affairs had become more complex, he detailed how Congress had gradually acceded to the President greater control in conducting American foreign relations and showed that it had not taken adequate precautions in the way these powers were wielded by the executive. In his 1990 workConstitutionalism, Democracy and Foreign Affairs Henkin reiterated his concerns about the growth of theImperial Presidency and its effect on the way the nation's foreign affairs were conducted, emphasizing that the preservation of human rights must play an important role. This and other books such asThe Rights of Man Today,How Nations Behave, andAge of Rights, comprised a collection of works thatThe New York Times described in his obituary as being "required reading for government officials and diplomats".[1] He was the Chief Reporter of the influential Restatement (Third) of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States.
Henkin died at age 92 on October 14, 2010, at his home in Manhattan after a long illness withAlzheimer's disease.[6] He was survived by his wife, Alice Hartman Henkin, as well as by three sons—his eldest,Joshua Henkin, is a novelist; his second son, David Henkin, is a professor of American history at theUniversity of California, Berkeley; and his youngest son, Daniel Henkin, is the Director of Music at theRamaz School—and five grandchildren.[1]
