Louis Henkin’s legacy

by Dorothy Lovell and Tim Shenk

Louis Henkin, 1917-2010.

Louis Henkin, a pioneering international lawyer and scholar who established human rights as an academic discipline, died on October 14, 2010, at the age of 92.

Professor Henkin was born in 1917 in present-day Belarus and emigrated with his family to the United States in 1923. He went on to graduate from Harvard Law School, before serving in the U.S. Army during World War II.

Professor Henkin went on to work as a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and then served with the UN bureau of the State Department. In 1951, as a State Department employee, he played an important role in the drafting of the UN Refugee Convention.

Professor Henkin eventually left the federal government and moved into the academic world. He spent time at Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania before he began teaching at Columbia Law School in 1962.

As an advocate and educator of human rights, Professor Henkin’s influence was profound.

In 1978, Professor Henkin founded the Center for the Study of Human Rights (now the Institute for the Study of Human Rights), the first such institution in the United States. Twenty years later he co-founded the Human Rights Institute at the Columbia Law School.

“It was his intellectual presence at Columbia that assured the academic standing of human rights and built the bridges necessary for its innovative interdisciplinary character,” recalls J. Paul Martin, former director of the Center for the Study of Human Rights.

Outside of Columbia, Professor Henkin helped found the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, now Human Rights First, an organization that seeks to build respect for human rights and the rule of law, working especially with refugees and civil and political rights.

Professor Henkin’s scholarship continues to shape the study of international law. He is much quoted for his assertion in How Nations Behave, “it is probably the case that almost all nations observe almost all principles of international law and almost all of their obligations almost all of the time.”

However, Professor Henkin was sometimes critical of the U.S. stance on international human rights law, writing in 1979, “In the cathedral of human rights, the United States is more like a flying buttress than a pillar — choosing to stand outside the international structure supporting the international human rights system, but without being willing to subject its own conduct to the scrutiny of that system.”

Professor Henkin was not only convinced of the universality of human rights in their application, but also that the responsibility to uphold these rights lay with each and every individual and organ of society. He gave a literal interpretation to the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that “every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms ... .”

For Professor Henkin, “Every individual and every organ of society excludes no one, no company, no market, no cyberspace.”

A memorial service for Professor Henkin will be held on March 28 from 4 to 5 p.m. in room 104 of Jerome Greene Hall at Columbia Law School.

Published in RightsNews Volume 29, no. 2, February, 2011.
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