Andreas Lowenfeld: A Life Illuminating the Path

photo: NYU Law School

I am sad to mark the passing of one of the giants of international law, and one of my teachers, Professor Andreas Lowenfeld of NYU Law School. His career was exemplary; Andy operated at the highest levels of practice and academia. In an era when so many scholars and practitioners become hyper-focused on one or two specific areas, Andy not only had incredible depth and precision, but also brought the panoramic view and sweeping vision of an earlier generation of international lawyers. Though perhaps best known for his work in international litigation and arbitration, that description does not capture his career. Consider this excerpt from his New York Times obituary:

Professor Lowenfeld was a towering figure in the fields of public international law, trade and economic law, private international law, and international arbitration. He served on the NYU Law faculty for 47 years, influencing generations of lawyers, and continued to teach International Litigation and Arbitration and International Monetary System among other courses until as recently as Spring 2013. Professor Lowenfeld wrote more than 18 books and authoritative legal treatises and over 115 law review articles and argued before the United States Supreme Court, the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal, and the International Court of Justice in the Hague. He made landmark contributions to legal scholarship and practice on issues as varied as extraterritorial jurisdiction, international arbitration, international monetary transactions, trans-border child abduction, international monetary law, investor-state dispute settlement, economic sanctions, enforcement of foreign judgments, aviation law, sovereign immunity, international trade, and civil procedure. His most recent work was a comprehensive treatise on International Economic Law. An avid supporter of the interaction between academics and practitioners, he was frequently an arbitrator in international disputes, public and private. He served as a Reporter on two major projects of the American Law Institute and was a lecturer twice at the Hague Academy, first in 1979 and later in 1994. In the 1994 lectures, he proposed criteria for a global community free of strict legal rules and based instead upon what he termed “reasonableness, not certainty.” One of the hallmarks of his work was his commitment to eliminating what he viewed as an unnecessary divide between public and private international law. In 2007, he was awarded the Manley O. Hudson Medal of the American Society of International Law for his lifelong achievements in the field of international law.

(Read the rest of the obituary here. See also this tribute from 2009.)

And that doesn’t even cover his years in the State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations where:

[h]e provided strategic counsel to those presidents during the Cuban Missile Crisis; the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty; the so-called “Chicken War,” in which the U.S. and the European Common Market sparred over poultry tariffs; and the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic.

Andy Lowenfeld’s scholarship and his career argued against the “unnecessary divide of public and private international law,” setting the stage (along with Philip Jessup) for the current focus on  complex regulation, transnational law, and dispute resolution. He taught us how public and private international law interact in an interconnected system and, by his example, he showed us how diverse aspects of the international legal profession could be integrated into a coherent career.

I have the great fortune of having been one of Andy’s students. My second year at NYU, I took the general course in international law, which was then team-taught by Andy Lowenfeld and Theodor Meron. Learning international law from “Ted and Andy” as we affectionately referred to them (behind their backs, that is) was everything you would expect from such lawyers: a lively dialogue interweaving law, history, politics, and economics.  I was also Andy’ s student in what was perhaps his signature course, his International Litigation and Arbitration seminar. Here he paired each JD student with a foreign LL.M. to brief and argue an issue in a case, before a bench made up of 3 of our classmates. It was a wonderful bit of experiential learning that has stayed with me and taught me as much about how to be a good teacher as to how to be a good litigator.

In the years since I graduated from law school, Andy Lowenfeld remained generous with his time and wise counsel. I may have become a professor, but he never stopped being my teacher.

But perhaps my favorite memory of Andy was from when I was the Director of Research and Outreach at the ASIL. Andy was a panelist on an international arbitration panel we organized for a Fifth Circuit judicial conference in San Antonio. After the panel, he told me we should go visit the Alamo. So, one hot summer afternoon we toured the Alamo together; I will always remember his enthusiasm in examining the exhibits, especially anything having to do with the deeds, land grants, and international agreements concerning the disposition of territory. He interspersed our conversation about the history of the U.S.-Mexico border with reminiscences from the State Department, career advice, some thoughts on scholarly projects I was considering, and anecdotes from his incredible career. At one point there was a boy, who was maybe seven years old, standing near us and holding a large faux-parchment facsimile of a document, probably recently acquired from the gift shop.  Andy started questioning the boy about the topic of the text on his souvenir, whether or not the reproduction was accurate, and so on. (The boy stared, then shrugged; Andy walked on.) It made me smile watching Andy attempting a Socratic dialogue with a first grader. Even while walking around the Alamo, Andy Lowenfeld was first and foremost an educator and a mentor.

I want to close with a few of Andy’s own words, taken from his magisterial International Economic Law (Oxford, 2d. ed 2008). In the preface, he argues against the skeptics and describes (with perhaps a wink to Louis Henkin) a realistic appreciation of international economic law:

This book is not founded on a claim that all states and all economic enterprises behave at all times according to all the rules, nor that the rules are clear and universally agreed at all levels. But one would not say that there is no criminal law because crimes continue to be committed and are not always punished, or that there is no family law because marriages break up, husbands beat their wives, and children are abused. In fact international conventions, collaborative arrangements, roughly uniform national laws, and customary laws apply to much of the international economy; while there is no global sheriff, and the system of remedies does not reach as far as the system of rules, there are a surprising number of consequences of deviant behavior, and a growing number of fora for resolving disputes among states and between states and private participants in the international economy.

Almost 1,000 pages later, the closing passage puts more than his treatise into perspective: :

It is evident that this book has made more use of narrative and illustration, and less of flat normative statements than might have been expected from a treatise. This approach reflects my belief that the answers cannot be understood without the question, and that abstract statements cannot be comprehended without awareness of the underlying facts and continuing controversies.

This is not to deny the normative character of international economic law. But international economic law—like all law but perhaps more so—is a process. Any attempt to define the law as of a given moment cannot help but distort. The process continues, and the hope is that this book has illuminated the path.

[Emphasis added.]

It has. And so has Andreas Lowenfeld’s life.