Henkin, Louis

B.A., Yeshiva, 1937; LL.B. Harvard, 1940; L.H.D., Yeshiva, 1963; LL.D. Columbia 1995; J.D.(hon.), Brooklyn, 1997. Was book review editor of the Harvard Law Review. Law clerk to Judge Learned Hand and to Justice Felix Frankfurter. After a period as consultant to the United Nations Legal Department, served with the Department of State from 1948 to 1956 in the UN Bureau and in the Office of European Regional Affairs (NATO); represented the U.S. on the committee drafting the Convention on the Status of Refugees, and served on U.S. delegations to the UN and to international conferences. Spent a year at Columbia in 1956–57 as associate director of the Legislative Drafting Research Fund while writing his first book, Arms Control and Inspection in American Law. After five years as professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania, in 1962 joined the Columbia Faculty of Law as well as the faculty of the Department of Political Science in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the School of International and Public Affairs. He was Hamilton Fish Professor of International Law and Diplomacy, and later Harlan Fiske Stone Professor of Constitutional Law until he was designated University Professor in 1981. Divides his time and interests among constitutional law, international law, law and diplomacy, and human rights, and has made specialties of the law of American foreign relations and international and comparative human rights. He is chairman of the directorate of the Columbia University Center for the Study of Human Rights, and founding chair and director of the Law School’s Institute of Human Rights. In his honor, the Law School established the Louis Henkin Professorship in Human Rights. Served as U.S. member, Permanent Court of Arbitration, 1963–69; member, Advisory Panel on International Law, U.S. Department of State, 1967–69, 1975–80, 1993–present; and adviser on the Law of the Sea, 1973–80. President of the American Society of International Law, 1992–94. Co-editor-in-chief of the American Journal of International Law, 1976–84. Chief reporter of the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States (Third). Member, fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences; member, Institut de Droit International; and member, American Philosophical Society. Board of directors, Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. Publications include How Nations Behave: Law and Foreign Policy; Law for the Sea’s Mineral Resources; Foreign Affairs and the Constitution; Constitutionalism, Democracy and Foreign Affairs; The Age of Rights; International Law: Politics and Values; The Rights of Man Today; The International Bill of Rights (ed.); International Law: Cases and Materials (co-ed.); Constitutionalism and Rights: The Influence of the U.S. Constitution Abroad (co-ed.); Human Rights (co-ed.); and other books and numerous articles.