A boyhood in Galicia
Hersch Lauterpacht was born on August 16, 1897, in Żółkiew, a small town in Eastern Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and today Zhovkva in western Ukraine. His father, Aron, was a comfortably-off timber merchant who took an intense interest in Jewish affairs; his mother was Deborah. He grew up in a devout Jewish household with an elder brother and a younger sister, and attended the local school until he was thirteen, when in 1911 the family moved to the regional capital, Lemberg, the city known in Polish as Lwów and today as Lviv.
Lemberg opened a wider world. There the teenage Hersch met other young Jews caught up in the new Zionist movement, and he became an activist. During the First World War his military service consisted largely of work at his father’s sawmill, which had been requisitioned by the army. According to an account given to the Jewish Historical Society of England, in 1917 he helped organise a demonstration celebrating the Balfour Declaration and was briefly arrested for it.
Closed doors, and the road to Vienna
Lauterpacht enrolled to study law at the university in Lemberg during the war. When the war ended and the region was absorbed into the new Polish state amid fierce national conflict, he found his path blocked: he later wrote that he could not sit his final examinations “because the university has been closed to Jews in Eastern Galicia.” The same law faculty would also, a few years later, educate Raphael Lemkin, the jurist who coined the word “genocide.”
Around 1919 Lauterpacht left for Vienna, where Jewish students also faced quotas and hostility. He studied under Hans Kelsen, the architect of Austria’s new constitution, who remembered him as an outstanding pupil, and took a doctorate in law in 1921 and another in political science in 1922. He was a natural leader: he was elected to head the World Union of Jewish Students. In Vienna he also met Rachel Steinberg, a young musician from Palestine studying piano. They married in 1923 and, barely two weeks later, left for London.
Remaking himself in England
Lauterpacht spoke Polish, Ukrainian, German and Hebrew, but almost no English when he arrived. He presented himself at the London School of Economics to Arnold McNair, the professor of international law, and the two could barely communicate. Within weeks, by attending lectures all day, he was fluent. His LSE doctorate, written under McNair, was published in 1927 as Private Law Sources and Analogies of International Law, and is still regarded as a seminal text. He joined the LSE staff, rose to a readership in 1935, and was called to the bar at Gray’s Inn in 1936.
He had originally intended to settle in Palestine, but McNair and others persuaded him that he could do more for his field from England. The family lived for about a decade at 103 Walm Lane in Cricklewood, north London, where their son Elihu was born in 1928, and Lauterpacht became a naturalised British subject in 1931. His 1933 book The Function of Law in the International Community, often considered his most influential, argued that there are no disputes too “political” for law to resolve, that international law, like any legal system, must be complete.
The individual at the centre of the law
The thread running through Lauterpacht’s work was a radical idea for its time: that international law is not only about relations between states, and that sovereignty does not give a government the right to treat its own people however it wishes. The ultimate subject of the law, he argued, is the individual human being. In 1937 he was elected Whewell Professor of International Law at Cambridge, the most prestigious chair in the field, and in 1938 the family moved to Cambridge, where he would teach until 1955. He also edited the standard treatise, Oppenheim’s International Law, through successive editions, and the Annual Digest of international cases, which became the International Law Reports.
In 1945, encouraged by the American Jewish Committee, he published An International Bill of the Rights of Man, setting out what an enforceable charter of human rights could look like. It was one of the key texts in the debates that produced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the European Convention on Human Rights in 1950. Lauterpacht himself was disappointed that the Universal Declaration was not legally binding; he wanted rights with remedies, not just proclamations.
During the first years of the Second World War, before the United States entered the fighting, Lauterpacht was quietly consulted by the American government. He supplied legal arguments to the U.S. Attorney General, Robert Jackson, later the chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg, to justify modifying American neutrality in Britain’s favour, arrangements that helped weapons flow across the Atlantic. It was the beginning of a working relationship that would matter greatly in 1945.
Nuremberg and “crimes against humanity”
After the war Lauterpacht served on the British War Crimes Executive, which prepared the British case at the first Nuremberg trial. He assisted the American chief prosecutor, Justice Robert Jackson, and wrote a considerable part of the opening and closing speeches of the British prosecutor, Sir Hartley Shawcross. He is credited with recommending the use of the terms “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” and he helped ensure that the defence of “superior orders”, I was only following orders, would not excuse the defendants.
Crimes against humanity mattered because it reached acts that the older laws of war did not: the persecution and murder of civilians, including by a state against its own citizens. For the first time an international tribunal held individuals personally responsible for such acts. Lauterpacht’s emphasis on protecting individuals contrasted with Lemkin’s focus on the protection of groups through the concept of genocide, a difference of approach that the lawyer and writer Philippe Sands explored in his book East West Street, which traces both men back to the same city.
A family destroyed
Lauterpacht’s work at Nuremberg was shadowed by private catastrophe. When Germany occupied Lemberg in 1941, his parents, brother and sister were still in the region. In August 1942, during the Nazi occupation, his parents and siblings were murdered; of his relatives in Poland, all but one perished. The one survivor was a young niece.
His Jewish commitments ran through his whole life. Beyond his youthful Zionism, in 1948 he was asked by diplomats of the Jewish community in Palestine to consider the legal basis for the new state’s independence, and he produced a draft declaration of independence, parts of which were incorporated into the text that became Israel’s Declaration of Independence. A memoir of his career noted that, with one or two exceptions, his English colleagues never showed hostility toward “this foreigner and Jew”, but he never forgot where he had come from, or the people he had lost.
The scholar at home
Those who met him found Lauterpacht quiet and reserved, with little taste for small talk. His students saw another side. He lectured without notes, building an argument across an hour from theory to example to conclusion, and his packed lectures were remembered as performances of rare clarity; one former pupil said they were the only lectures of his student life in which he took no notes, because he did not want to divide his attention. He took a keen personal interest in his students and entertained them often at the family home on Cranmer Road in Cambridge.
Outside the law he played chess on antique sets he collected, could manage a Beethoven sonata at the piano, and collected Georgian English silver. His son Eli remembered him spending long hours in his study, and his parents dancing around the living room to Bizet’s Carmen.
Judge at The Hague
Lauterpacht served on the United Nations International Law Commission in the early 1950s, where he was special rapporteur on the law of treaties. He had already represented Britain before the International Court of Justice in the Corfu Channel and Anglo-Iranian Oil Company cases. In 1954 he was elected the British judge on the Court, taking up his seat in 1955, and in 1956 he was knighted. His carefully reasoned separate and dissenting opinions are still regularly cited in judgments and legal argument.
Recognition came from many quarters. In 1959 the University of Geneva, celebrating its 350th anniversary, awarded him an honorary degree before an audience of university heads from around the world, he was said to be the only Jew honoured on that occasion, a distinction that gave him particular satisfaction.
He suffered a severe heart attack in 1959 and died in London on May 8, 1960, at the age of sixty-two, while still a serving judge.
Legacy
Former Court president Stephen Schwebel judged that Lauterpacht’s attainments were unsurpassed by any international lawyer of the century, and Philippe Sands has called him the finest international legal mind of the twentieth century and a father of the modern human rights movement. The ideas he fought for, that individuals have rights against their own governments, that those who commit atrocities can be tried personally, and that obeying orders is no excuse, are now the foundations of international criminal courts, human rights treaties and tribunals around the world.
His son, Sir Elihu Lauterpacht, became a leading international lawyer himself and founded the research centre at Cambridge that now bears both their names, the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law. An English Heritage blue plaque marks the Cricklewood house where the young refugee scholar remade himself, and the Sir Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lectures are held at Cambridge each year.
Sources & further reading
Hersch Lauterpacht, Wikipedia · Sir Hersch Lauterpacht, English Heritage blue plaque · Dorothy Stone, “Sir Hersch Lauterpacht: teacher, writer and judge”, Jewish Historical Society of England · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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