Louis Bruno son

Louis Bruno Sohn (born March  1, 1914 in Lemberg , today Ukraine ; † June 7, 2006 in Falls Church , Virginia ), born Ludwig Bruno Sohn , was an Austrian - American lawyer of Jewish descent who worked as professor of international law at the Harvard University and the University of Georgia . His main focus was on human rights and the role of international organizations , especially the United Nations .

Life

Louis Bruno Sohn was born in 1914 in the city ​​of Lemberg, which at that time belonged to the Galicia part of Austria-Hungary, as the son of a couple of doctors and studied law at the Johann Kasimir University there until 1935 , at whose institute for international private law he then worked as a research assistant was active. His father barely survived the Holocaust and his mother died during the first winter of the war.

Two weeks before the start of the Second World War , Louis Bruno Sohn emigrated to the United States , where he received a Master of Laws (LL.M.) degree from Harvard University in 1940 and a Doctor of Law (SJD ) in 1961 ) PhD . After teaching at Harvard in 1941, he was appointed assistant professor in 1951 and ten years later he was appointed to the Bemis chair in international law. From 1974 to 1982 he was a delegate at the conference at which the Convention on the Law of the Sea was drawn up and adopted, and also acted twice as a representative of the United States before the International Court of Justice .

After his retirement from Harvard University in 1981, he moved to the University of Georgia on the recommendation of former US Secretary of State Dean Rusk , where he was Woodruff Professor of International Law until 1991. He then worked as a Distinguished Research Professor at George Washington University , where he founded the International Rule of Law Center at its law school . From 1998 to 2000 he served as President of the American Society for International Law . Until shortly before his 90th birthday, he supervised students and doctoral candidates.

Louis Bruno's son was married for 65 years and died of a stroke in 2006 in Falls Church .

Act

The main focus of Louis Bruno Sohn's work was the field of human rights , the settlement of international conflicts and the role of international organizations , especially the United Nations (UN) and its institutions, in the context of the political and social world order . Other areas of law to which he devoted himself were the law of the sea , international environmental law, and arms control and disarmament . His mentor in the United States was his predecessor as Bemis professor at Harvard, Manley Ottmer Hudson , and his students included Thomas Buergenthal , who, like his son, had fled Europe to the United States because of his Jewish descent .

Louis Bruno Sohn was an advocate of international institutions and a passionate supporter of the United Nations. In 1945 he took part in the founding conference of the UN in San Francisco , during which he was involved in drafting parts of the UN Charter . As early as 1958 he published a series of proposals for a reformation of the United Nations and its institutions with the work "World Peace Through World Law". His ideas concerned, for example, a distribution of votes in the UN General Assembly according to the population of the member countries, the transformation of the UN Security Council into an Executive Council without the right of veto of the individual members, the further development of the UN into a world government with a budget of more than 35 billion US dollars and the establishment of a permanent peacekeeping force with around 400,000 soldiers.

In addition, he was one of the first lawyers to make the Universal Declaration of Human Rights binding. The proclamation proclaimed by the International Conference on Human Rights of Tehran in 1968, which described the UN Charter of Human Rights as the "common understanding of the peoples of the world of the inalienable and inviolable rights of all members of the human family", was his initiative .

Awards

Louis Bruno Sohn was recognized as one of the most outstanding lawyers of his time in the field of international law. The then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan paid tribute to him in a declaration as an “important figure in the history of the United Nations and international law” and as a “voice of reason and a source of wisdom”.

In 1964, Sohn was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He has received honorary doctorates from various universities, the Leonard J. Theberge Prize of the American Bar Association and, in 1996, the Manley O. Hudson Medal , the highest award of the American Society for International Law. In 1991 he was accepted into the Institut de Droit international . The Center for International Environmental Law presented him with the first International Environmental Law Award in 2003 for his contributions to international environmental law.

The Louis B. Sohn Prize, which is awarded by the International Law Section of the American Bar Association, is named after him.

Works (selection)

• Basic Documents of the United Nations. London 1956
• World Peace Through World Law. Cambridge, MA 1958
• Cases on United Nations Law. New York 1967
• Basic Documents of African Regional Organizations. New York 1971
• International Organization and Integration. Dordrecht 1986

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Thomas Buergenthal : Louis B. Son (1914-2006). Obituary in: American Journal of International Law . 100 (3) / 2006. American Society of International Law, pp. 623-626, ISSN  0002-9300
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Rainer Huhle: 60 years of human rights: The people behind the story. Louis B. Sohn (1914–2006)  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .  Published by the Nuremberg Human Rights Center, 2008 ( PDF file , approx. 66 kB)
3. ↑ ASIL Presidents: Louis Bruno Sohn ( Memento of the original from December 10, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (accessed on December 16, 2008) 
4. ↑ ^{a b} Obituary by Patricia Sullivan in the Washington Post : International Law Expert Louis Sohn (June 13, 2006 issue)
5. ↑ ^{a b} Obituary by Dennis Hevesi in the New York Times : Louis B. Sohn, Passionate Supporter of the UN, Dies at 92 (June 23, 2006 issue)
6. ↑ ^{a b} Daniel Barstow Magraw: Louis B. Son: Architect of the Modern International Legal System. In: Harvard International Law Journal. 48 (1) / 2007. Harvard Law School, pp. 1-11, ISSN  0017-8063
7. ↑ Statement attributable to the Spokesman for the Secretary-General on the death of Professor Louis B. Sohn (accessed July 2, 2010)
8. ↑ Detlev F. Vagts: Louis B. Son. In: Harvard International Law Journal. 48 (1) / 2007. Harvard Law School, pp. 19-21, ISSN  0017-8063
9. ^ Peter Macalister-Smith: Bio-Bibliographical Key to the Membership of the Institut de Droit International, 1873-2001. In: Journal of the History of International Law. 5 (1) / 2003. Brill Academic Publishers, pp. 77-159, ISSN  1388-199X

literature

• Thomas Buergenthal : Louis B. Son (1914-2006). In: American Journal of International Law . 100 (3) / 2006. American Society of International Law, pp. 623-626, ISSN  0002-9300
• Daniel Barstow Magraw: Louis B. Sohn: Architect of the Modern International Legal System. In: Harvard International Law Journal. 48 (1) / 2007. Harvard Law School, pp. 1-11, ISSN  0017-8063
• Jo M. Pasqualucci: Louis Sohn: Grandfather of International Human Rights Law in the United States. In: Human Rights Quarterly. 20 (4 )/1998. Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 924-944, ISSN  0275-0392

Web links

• Literature by and about Louis Bruno Sohn in the catalog of the German National Library