A family of lawyers and emancipators
Tobias Michael Carel Asser was born in Amsterdam on 28 April 1838 into a Jewish family with a remarkable tradition in the law. His great-grandfather, Moses Solomon Asser (1754–1826), an Amsterdam merchant and jurist, was one of the leading figures in the civic emancipation of Dutch Jews after 1795. His great-uncle Carel Asser was one of the first Jews to practise law in Holland. His grandfather and his father, Carel Daniël Asser, were well-established lawyers, and an uncle served as Dutch minister of justice.
His mother, Rosette Godefroi, was the sister of Michel Henry Godefroi, the first Jewish minister in a Dutch government. Young Tobias grew up, in other words, in a family that had helped win Dutch Jews equal citizenship and had then used that citizenship to serve the law and the state. It was natural that he would think of law as a tool for making relations between people fairer and more predictable.
A brilliant start
Asser was a gifted student. In 1857 he won a competition with a thesis on the economic concept of value, and for a time he considered a career in business. Instead he studied law at the Athenaeum Illustre in Amsterdam and took his doctorate in 1860, at the age of twenty-one, with a thesis on the history of Dutch constitutional principles in foreign affairs. That same year the Dutch government appointed him to an international commission negotiating the abolition of tolls on the Rhine, a first taste of the diplomacy of cooperation that would define his life.
In 1862 he became professor of private law at the Athenaeum, and when it became the University of Amsterdam in 1876 he continued as professor of international and commercial law, while keeping a reduced legal practice. He was an accomplished linguist, working comfortably in German, French and English as well as Dutch.
The problem of conflicting laws
Asser chose a field that sounds technical but touches ordinary lives: private international law, also called conflict of laws. It answers questions that arise whenever people, families or businesses cross borders. If a Dutch man marries a German woman in Belgium, which country’s law decides whether the marriage is valid? If they divorce, which court decides who looks after the children? If a merchant in one country sues a customer in another, how are court papers served and judgments recognised?
In the nineteenth century every country answered these questions differently, leaving families and traders in legal limbo. Asser believed the best solution was for governments to meet and agree on common rules, which each nation would then enact in its own law. With the Belgian Gustave Rolin-Jaequemyns and the Englishman John Westlake he founded in 1869 one of the first journals of international law, the Revue de droit international et de législation comparée, and in 1873 he was among the founders, at Ghent, of the Institute of International Law, which he later led.
Scholar and teacher
Asser’s scholarship underpinned his diplomacy. His Schets van het internationaal privaatregt (Outline of Private International Law, 1877) became a standard work, and his Schets van het Nederlandsche handelsregt (Outline of Dutch Commercial Law) appeared in a new edition in 1904. He also wrote on the Hague convention of 1896 on civil procedure, explaining how the new rules would work in practice. In 1880 he became a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
His teaching career at the Athenaeum and the University of Amsterdam spanned more than three decades, and he trained a generation of Dutch lawyers to think internationally. The Institute of International Law that he helped found in 1873 remains active today, bringing together leading international lawyers to propose rules and resolutions for states. Through the Revue he co-founded, he also helped create international law as a modern academic discipline with its own journals, debates and community of scholars across Europe.
Founding the Hague Conference
Asser persuaded the Dutch government to invite the countries of Europe to The Hague to work on a common codification of private international law. Delegates from thirteen states met in 1893, at his initiative, and elected him president. He presided again in 1894, 1900 and 1904. The first conferences produced a treaty on civil procedure, which came into effect in 1899 and set uniform rules for conducting civil cases across borders. The conferences of 1900 and 1904 produced conventions governing international family law, including marriage, divorce, legal separation and the guardianship of minors.
The organisation he started, now called the Hague Conference on Private International Law, or HCCH, became a permanent intergovernmental organisation in 1955. Today it has 94 member states plus the European Union, its work reaches more than 150 countries, and it has adopted more than 40 conventions and instruments. Its own history begins with the 1893 meeting held, as it says, at the initiative of Tobias Asser.
How his work helps people today
The descendants of Asser’s conferences touch millions of lives. The Hague Child Abduction Convention of 1980, with 103 contracting parties, provides for the prompt return of children wrongfully taken across borders by a parent, so that custody is decided by the courts of the child’s home country. The 1993 Intercountry Adoption Convention, with 107 parties, sets safeguards to protect children and prevent trafficking in international adoption. The 1961 Apostille Convention, with 130 parties, lets birth certificates, diplomas and court documents be recognised abroad with a single certificate instead of a chain of embassy stamps.
Other Hague conventions help families collect child support across borders and help courts serve documents and gather evidence abroad. Behind them all lies Asser’s simple conviction: that people should not lose their rights, or their children, because their lives cross a frontier.
Newer instruments continue the work. The 2007 Child Support Convention helps parents recover maintenance payments for children from a parent living in another country, and the 2019 Judgments Convention makes it easier for court decisions in civil and commercial cases to be recognised and enforced across borders. The 1965 Service Convention and the 1970 Evidence Convention, two of the most widely used, let courts deliver legal papers and gather testimony abroad through agreed channels. For a parent seeking a child taken overseas, a couple adopting from another country, a student sending a diploma to a foreign university or a small business pursuing an unpaid invoice abroad, these rules turn what could be years of legal confusion into a defined procedure.
Diplomat and arbitrator
Asser also served his country directly. He became legal adviser to the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1875, a member of the Council of State in 1893, president of the State Commission for International Law from 1898, and a minister without portfolio from 1904 until his death. From 1875 to 1913 he was involved in virtually every treaty the Netherlands concluded. One of his triumphs was winning a seat for the Netherlands and Spain beside the great powers on the Suez Canal Commission, which drew up the 1888 Convention guaranteeing the canal’s neutrality.
At the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907 he represented the Netherlands and urged compulsory arbitration of economic disputes. He helped create the Permanent Court of Arbitration and in 1902 sat on its very first case, the Pious Fund dispute between the United States and Mexico, an early demonstration that nations could settle disagreements before judges rather than on battlefields.
Nobel Prize and Jewish identity
In 1911 the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize jointly to Asser and the Austrian pacifist Alfred Fried. The committee’s chairman called Asser a successor to, or reviver of, the Netherlands’ pioneering work in international law in the seventeenth century, the age of Hugo Grotius. Universities in Edinburgh, Cambridge, Bologna and Berlin gave him honorary degrees.
Asser was raised in the Jewish community and for a time served it: according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, he was a member of the board of trustees of the Dutch Israelite Seminary from 1882 to 1887. The same source records that he broke with Judaism around 1890. His career nonetheless grew directly out of a Jewish family story, that of a minority which had won equal rights through law and then helped build the legal institutions of the modern Netherlands.
Death and legacy
Asser married Johanna Ernestina Asser in 1864. He died in The Hague on 29 July 1913, aged seventy-five, only weeks before the Peace Palace, built in The Hague to house the Permanent Court of Arbitration he had helped create, was opened that August. He had worked to found an academy of international law but did not live to see it; the Hague Academy of International Law opened in 1923. A library of international law that he gathered with contributions from twenty countries is housed in the Peace Palace at The Hague as the Asser Collection, and the T.M.C. Asser Instituut in The Hague, a centre for research in international and European law, bears his name.
His greatest monument is less visible. Every time a court in one country returns an abducted child to another, recognises a foreign adoption, or accepts a document stamped with an apostille, it is using a system that began with the conference Tobias Asser called in The Hague in 1893.
Sources & further reading
Tobias Asser, Biographical, NobelPrize.org · About HCCH, Hague Conference on Private International Law · Status table: Convention of 25 October 1980 on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, HCCH · Asser, Encyclopaedia Judaica (via Encyclopedia.com) · Tobias Asser, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.