Hersch Lauterpacht: A Personal Recollection

Abstract

It is quite right to couple recollection of Hersch Lauterpacht with Arnold McNair. It was the McNairs who befriended the Lauterpachts when they arrived as immigrants in England, and generally looked after them and encouraged them in many ways in those early difficult years. They became very close friends and that friendship remained strong until Lauterpacht's premature death from cancer in 1960. In many ways, it must have been rather an attraction of opposites, for they were very different For Lauterpacht, the subject of public international law (he hardly found occasion to mention private international law) was the thing. McNair, on the other hand, was convinced that a student must first thoroughly study a municipal system, including constitutional law, after which he might then turn to the study of public international law. It was McNair who insisted that Lauterpacht, even after he was already established in Cambridge as the Whewell Professor, should take the bar examinations and get himself called as a barrister, thus having a professional qualification in English law. I remember Hersch Lauterpacht telling me, in his study on the upper floor of his home (the house where the McNairs had formerly lived) how bored he was with the study of the English law of contract for the purposes of the written examination for the Bar. But of course he stuck to it, for he would never have failed to do anything that Arnold McNair thought it important for him to do. And he was called to the Bar of Gray's Inn in due course. For McNair, to have a professional qualification in English law, whether barrister or solicitor (he himself had begun as a solicitor), was much more desirable for one teaching law in an English University than to have a purely international law qualification, such as election to the Institut de Droit International. Besides, he would not have understood at all a sense of boredom with the elements of the English law of contract, which he himself had taught, and which he found a source of tireless fascination. I myself knew McNair almost two decades before I came across Lauterpacht I attended McNair's lectures in international law as an undergraduate in 1933, when I was reading for Part I of the Law Tripos. In those enlightened days, thanks very largely to the great influence of McNair and indeed also of Harold Gutteridge, public international law was a compulsory subject It was admiration for McNair that decided me to read that subject in my fourth year reading for the TJ.R degree, then a