In Memoriam

Introduction*

Professor Louis B. Sohn (1914–2006) was not only present at the creation of the modern international legal system, he was its principal architect. He participated in the 1945 drafting conference in San Francisco that created the United Nations,  as well as in events leading up to the conference. He also played a leading role in the creation or development of many other areas of international law, including human rights, international environmental law, law of the sea, international organizations, arms control and disarmament, and international dispute settlement. Each of these areas of international law bears his creative and indelible mind-print.

In addition to contributing to the development of specific areas of international law and its institutions, Louis had systemic, cross-cutting impacts having to do with the very nature of the international legal system. As Dean Harold Koh notes in his essay in this volume, “[Louis] helped shape the exact moment in history when international law made its dramatic shift from a loose web of customary, do-no-harm, state-centric rules toward an ambitious positive law framework built around institutions and constitutions—international institutions governed by multilateral treaties that aspired to organize proactive assaults on a vast array of global problems.”  His vision involved the recognition that international law could, and indeed should, move beyond the regulation of state-to-state activities to also govern significant aspects of the complex set of relationships among non-state actors such as individuals, transnational corporations, nongovernmental organizations, and intergovernmental organizations. His most ambitious effort in this respect was the co-authored book World Peace Through World Law, which envisioned an unusually strong world government, including criminal enforcement powers.

In that process, Louis recognized the indivisible inter-connectedness of all elements of the legal system. In Dean Koh’s words, Louis “led an intellectual revolution to break down the historic distinctions between public and private law, domestic and international law, and municipal and global governance.”  Louis was keenly aware of the interrelations within the legal system as a whole, just as he came to be keenly aware of the interdependence of the biosphere, including human society, and the need to address that interdependence through international law and cooperation.

Famously described as “the Brain who walks like a Man” and recipient of a staggering array of honors, Louis’s vision, knowledge, flexibility, energy, persistence, humility, extraordinary attention to detail, and dedication to the rule of law were legendary around the world. He played many roles during his career, including teacher at three law schools, scholar, author of innumerable articles and books, advisor (informal and formal) to national and state governments and intergovernmental organizations, negotiator of treaties and soft law instruments, advocate in two cases before the International Court of Justice, legal statesman, and source of inspiration to generations of international lawyers. He also was active in a wide array of important non-governmental organizations, including the American Bar Association (“ABA”), the American Law Institute (“ALI”), and the American Society of International Law (“ASIL”), the activities of which benefited immeasurably from his participation. He chose these activities strategically so that they led to the further development and effectiveness of international law.

In some cases Louis’s influence was direct, e.g., via participation in intergovernmental negotiations. In other instances it was indirect, e.g., through ideas he suggested to officials or through the impact of his numerous scholarly works.  Similarly, sometimes his influence was open and visible, such as with respect to dispute settlement in the law of the sea negotiations; and sometimes, as it often is with lawyers who remain in the background while their clients (or others they are working with) have the public role, his influence was invisible to all but those he was advising. Partly because of this, we will never know the full extent of the impact he had on international law and institutions.

The other contributors to this tribute, Dean Harold Hongju Koh and Professors Thomas M. Franck, Detlev F. Vagts, and David Kennedy provide personal insights about Louis and his work. I highly commend these essays, as well as a set of personal tributes in the George Washington International Law Review. They are testament to the significant effect Louis had on others and to how rare and wonderful he was as a human being. As one of those contributors puts it, “We will not see his like in the years to come.”

In the remainder of this Article, I first provide a brief biographical sketch of Louis Sohn’s life. I then describe samples of Louis’s contributions to five areas of the international legal system: the United Nations, human rights, international environmental law, law of the sea, and arms control and disarmament. These samples provide a sense of how broad Louis’s vision was and how comprehensive his approach was to effectuating change. Those sections are followed by comments about Louis’s impact via teaching and mentoring, and a Conclusion….

* This excerpt does not include citations. To read the entire article, including supporting notes, please download the PDF.

With the passing of Louis Sohn, we have lost almost the entire cohort of international lawyers who were “present at the creation.” This phrase, which is the title of Dean Acheson’s autobiography,^₁ refers to the lawyers having been involved in the planning, drafting, and implementation of the post–World War II international system. This was an exhilarating achievement after the gloom of the international anarchy of the 1930s and the horrors of World War II. The founding of the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and other organizations gave participants the satisfaction of having done something truly constructive. It left that cohort with a sense of accomplishment and great optimism about the future. The cohort comprised both veteran international lawyers and recent law school graduates. Louis was in an excellent position to observe and provide research support for these projects as the following autobiographical passage illustrates:

Dr. Ricardo J. Alfaro . . . was asked by William Draper Lewis, the Director of the American Law Institute in 1942, to participate in drafting a statement on essential human rights that would implement President Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms. Alfaro was a friend of Manley O. Hudson, Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School, and came to see him about it. During the conversation, he asked whether Hudson knew about any previous drafts of international declarations on human rights. I was Hudson’s assistant at that time and was sitting across the table from them working on the book on international tribunals. Hudson looked at me and, in his usual style, said: “Louis, find one for him.” . . . I glanced behind me, and there was a collection of the Hague Academy’s Receuil des Cours. [I found a reference to the 1929 declaration of the Institut de Droit International] and in a few minutes was able to hand Alfaro the text of the declaration. He took notes, thanked us and departed. Of course, this visit stimulated my interest in human rights. . . ._²

These internationalists thereafter worked to maintain the institutions thus created, despite the difficulties they encountered. Louis focused on the United Nations, where he became the expert. Those who survived into the 1990s saw their optimism vindicated by the end of the Cold War and the development of cooperation between the former “evil empire” and the Western community. Events beginning with the attack on Iraq in 2003 without the blessing of the Security Council have been devastating to that optitism. A new generation of international law scholars has emerged that welcomes the destruction of all obstacles to the United States’ exercise of its hegemonic powers. One rather hopes that Louis never really absorbed the degree to which his system was shattered by those events.

Louis Sohn played an active role in public affairs and saw success come to several ventures. He was able to make headway on political fronts in alliance with various charismatic people. His work was important in the creation of the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act of 1976, with the principal public role played by Monroe Leigh, the Legal Adviser, who had finely honed Washington bureaucratic and congressional skills. Louis contributed significantly to the formulation of a text for the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, though the bureaucratic and political work fell to the lot of John Stevenson, a polished Wall Street lawyer. In his less successful efforts to build a more effective United Nations, Louis was associated with Grenville Clark, whom he characterized in his memorial address as “a patrician gentleman.”^₃ Louis, as co-reporter, was also a major participant in the work of the American Law Institute on the Restatement (Third) of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States. Louis was elected to such important posts as the presidency of the American Society of International Law (1988–1989) and chair of the international law section of the American Bar Association (1992–2003). One of the topics Louis dedicated his pioneering efforts to was the law of human rights. While it would have appealed to him in any case, his own experience in escaping Poland in 1939 on the last boat from Gdansk coupled with what happened to those who could not leave must have given him an added impetus. In this, his experience paralleled that of Thomas Buergenthal, with whom he collaborated extensively. It was a major innovation in international law to think that a state has duties to treat its own nationals humanely, and it is much to Louis’s credit that he saw the possibilities and challenges so early.

As a teacher, Louis remained in a European mode. He was not a charismatic teacher in large classes, although he delivered clear and precise lectures. His outstanding impact was on graduate students with whom he acted as a Doktorvater. He sympathized with their struggles, doubtless remembering his rather difficult early years at Harvard Law School when he arrived in Cambridge without any resources or backing. He pressed his students hard and led them deep into the world of learning that he had accumulated. Louis and I supervised a student’s thesis having to do with the exploitation of mineral resources in the deep seabed when the boundaries were in dispute between two nations. Louis pressed him so hard in his research of the maritime boundary issues that the student had trouble fitting in the reading on issues of oil and gas law that he needed to complete my part of the research. In any case, the student, now an important public servant in his home country, became a loyal devotee of Louis, as did an impressive string of doctoral degree holders. It is significant that when the shadows lengthened on Louis’s life, it was these graduate students who communicated their concern, who visited Louis when that seemed to be useful, and who passed on the news about his situation. One of Louis’s most passionate relationships was with books. He was, in a sense, the ultimate international law scholar of the Gutenberg epoch with a voracious appetite for reading and a tenacious memory. For one thing, he had an enormous collection of U.N. documents, a body that grew relentlessly from its modest beginnings in the 1940s to a mountain of paper thirty years later. Colleagues were surprised when he could reach into the mountainous pile and pull out exactly the document that they needed. When he left Harvard to go to Georgia in 1981, the Mayflower moving company summoned its largest sixteen-wheeler to move that collection. When I asked the driver if he could handle the challenge, he said that the truck could manage it, but expressed some concern about one or two bridges near Athens, Georgia.

The roll of honors that Louis accumulated during his career includes almost every award available in the field, and he deserved them all. They included the Manley O. Hudson Medal of the American Society of International Law, the Leonard Theberge Award from the American Bar Association, and enough honorary doctorates to entitle him to write, as some German dignitaries do, “Dr. h.c. mult.”^₄ But his real prize was the esteem and affection with which his students and colleagues regarded him. We will not see his like in the years to come.

^₁ DEAN ACHESON, PRESENT AT THE CREATION: MY YEARS IN THE STATE DEPARTMENT (1969).
^₂ Louis B. Sohn, How American Lawyers Prepared for the San Francisco Bill of Rights, 89 AM. J. INT’L L. 540, 546–47 (1995).
^₃ Louis B. Sohn, Memorial: Grenville Clark, 61 AM. SOC’Y INT’L L. PROC. 216, 217 (1967).
^₄ “Many honorary doctorates.”

Louis B. Sohn was my grandfather in the law. I call him that because I first met him more than fifty years ago, when my late father, Kwang Lim Koh, wrote his S.J.D. dissertation at Harvard Law School under Professor Sohn’s supervision. When my sister Jean Koh Peters—who is now my colleague at Yale Law School—and I followed suit some twenty-five years later, we became the second generation in our family to study international law under Louis’s watchful eye.

My father originally came to Harvard to study not under Louis, but under Louis’s great mentor, Bemis Professor of International Law and former Judge of the Permanent Court of International Justice Manley O. Hudson. But when Judge Hudson died, Professor Sohn generously took on my father as his doctoral candidate. And so it was that, under Louis’s supervision, my father came to write his S.J.D. dissertation, long before the issue became timely, on the regulation of international fisheries and the continental shelf under the Law of the Sea regime. Over the next thirty-five years, my father became, and remained, one of Louis’s most devoted students.

As an immigrant who spoke accented English his whole life, Louis was a magnet not just for my father, but for scores of other foreign students as well. Born in what is now Ukraine and educated in Poland, Sohn came to America when he was twenty-five, only to find a new family among the legions of foreign graduate students who came to study with him over the years. Writing for my father’s festschrift twenty-five years ago, Louis revealed what his own student days must have been like. He recalled: “Like many foreign students—including myself—[Dr. Koh must have] found it difficult at the beginning to adjust to the hectic pace of the American law school, to the—to the non-American—unusual requirement of having to prepare for every class and to the danger of being called upon to recite a case and present his views, to be torn to shreds by the professor and the other students.”^₁

Louis remembered every one of his students and treated them graciously. I remember visiting his home with my parents, where he and Betty, his lovely wife of sixty-five years, treated us with great warmth. When my sister and I were law students, we would occasionally visit Louis’s paper-flooded office in the international law library to take him out for Chinese food.^₂ A man of steady habits, he loved his office. And at every visit, he proudly showed us a new book, article, treaty, or manuscript.

As a lecturer, Professor Sohn was incredibly calm at all times, as well as very kind. His classes sometimes seemed dry at the start, but became fascinating once the listener got onto his wavelength. In those days some students considered Louis bookish by comparison to the dashing men of action who sat alongside him on the Harvard international law faculty: Abe Chayes, Dick Baxter, and Milton Katz. But listening to Professor Sohn lecture one day, it dawned on me that his was perhaps the most spacious vision for international law.

As a research assistant to Professor Hudson from 1940 to 1946, Louis had dealt with the most momentous issues surrounding the creation of a postwar world order. He helped to write the American Bar Association’s draft international law covenant that led to the adoption of the United Nations Charter. Sitting at Judge Hudson’s side, he was quite literally present at the creation of the U.N. in San Francisco.^₃ As a passenger on one of the last boats out of Poland before the Nazi invasion, his exposure to the horrors of World War II gave him a profound appreciation for human rights. And so, working with the American Bar Association, he drafted a document that became one of the precursors to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.^₄

In those heady days, there seemed to be nothing one could not construct with international law. Playing varied roles, Louis became nothing less than an architect of the new world order. Just as others today aspire to be architects of cyberspace or the new global economy, Louis Sohn was present at the creation of a new vision for international law. He helped shape the exact moment in history when international law made its dramatic shift from a loose web of customary, do-no-harm, state-centric rules toward an ambitious positive law framework built around institutions and constitutions—international institutions governed by multilateral treaties aspiring to organize proactive assaults on a vast array of global problems.

In a dazzling range of areas—including arms control, the law of the sea, the law of state responsibility, the law of international organizations, international environmental law, and international dispute resolution—Louis helped draft global “constitutions” that sought both to allocate institutional responsibilities and to declare workable rules of international law. By helping construct this complex positive law framework of institutions and constitutions, Sohn re-conceptualized international law as a creative medium for organizing the activities and relations of numerous transnational players, a category that now included individuals, networks, nongovernmental organizations, and intergovernmental organizations interacting within what I have elsewhere called a “transnational legal process.”^₅ Within this global framework, Louis dreamed, international legal rules would not only reflect parochial state interests but also advance the broader goals of an enlightened international system.

And so, ironically, the traditionalist became a revolutionary. The quiet man led an intellectual revolution to break down the historic distinctions between public and private law, domestic and international law, and municipal and global governance.

Thus arose the central irony of Louis Sohn’s life. A stunningly modest man, he became the architect of a stunningly ambitious global project. To see his reach, one need only read Louis’s most ambitious work, his collaboration with Grenville Clark, World Peace Through World Law, which proposed a criminal law enforcement model to enforce international rules, with the great powers of the United Nations acting jointly as the world’s police.^₆ Unfortunately, almost as soon as this sweeping blueprint was drafted, the intense bipolarity of the Cold War era frustrated its ambitions.
When I met him again, as a law student during the cynical post-Vietnam era, I often heard Sohn mocked as an apologist for international law, an idealist among realists, a Wilsonian in a world of Kissinger wanna-bes. I remember attending one conference where international law was being sarcastically dismissed. Professor Sohn rose earnestly from the back benches to insist that the glass of international law was in fact half full.

Despite the challenges, however, the idealist adapted and became a principled pragmatist. Over time, I watched as he helped make different pieces of his world vision a reality.^₇ The mid-1980s were a particularly exciting time, when as a young lawyer in Washington, I watched Louis close up as he pursued four important assignments: U.S. Representative to the Law of the Sea Convention, Counsel for the United States before the International Court of Justice in Nicaragua v. United States,^₈ Associate Reporter of the Restatement (Third) of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States,^₉ and Chair of the ABA’s International Law Section. Remarkably, in his seventies, Louis went from being a man of letters to a man of action. The academic became a litigator; the professor with his head in the clouds became a politician with his feet on the ground.

Once Louis entered the world of action, he turned out to be remarkably effective, for the simple reason that his decades of mentorship, selflessness, and integrity had won him so many friends.^₁₀ His work on the law of the sea won him admirers in the most unexpected quarters: he was granted, for example, his favorite title: Honorary Admiral of the Texas Navy.^₁₁ When, many years later, as Assistant Secretary of State, I was mired in several frustrating multilateral drafting exercises, I took time out for a lunch in Washington, which Louis graciously attended. I asked him how he had been so successful with complex multilateral negotiations. He quipped cryptically: “Don’t forget the pastrami sandwiches.” When I asked what that meant, he told me how he had negotiated the dispute-settlement provisions of the Law of the Sea Treaty.^₁₂ Every day for two weeks, he had gathered the delegates in a conference room and ordered them the exact same lunch: pastrami sandwiches. By the end of the conference, he said with a smile, “they were very happy to settle for my preferred alternative: a ‘smorgasbord approach’ to law of the sea dispute-settlement.”

Like the other international law giants of his generation—Lou Henkin, Myres McDougal, Oscar Schachter—Louis possessed a constancy of optimism and a graciousness and good humor that never varied over the years. He was one of the first to recognize that the post-Nuremberg growth of international human rights law and its incursions into domestic jurisdiction would challenge the very dualism of the distinction between international and domestic law. And so, over the years, his deep commitment to human dignity led him to shift his gaze from states to individuals, and his writing toward a deeper appreciation of the role of transnationalism within a complex global legal process._¹³

And another irony: over the years, this man who loved his office became a peripatetic world traveler. I would run into him in airports well into his eighties, always looking exactly the same, a bulging briefcase in each hand, his suit off the rack, his tie a bit too short. At each of these chance meetings, he would greet me without surprise and cheerfully describe how he had just traveled thousands of miles, without visible strain.

As the decades passed, he succeeded Judge Hudson as Bemis Professor at Harvard, then went on to hold distinguished chaired professorships at Georgia and George Washington University. He was everywhere revered. In Athens, Georgia, a colleague once told me, he was held in such awe that he became known as “The Brain who walks like a Man.”

Once I became an international law professor myself, Louis took me under his wing in a familial way. We would have lunch together, once at Grand Central Station, but more regularly at the annual meeting of the American Society of International Law. He was never overly generous with his praise. One year, however, shortly after my father passed away, Louis knew I was feeling low. After my presentation, he squeezed my elbow. He whispered with grandfatherly pride: “You gave a good talk. I know your father would be very pleased.”

And so, although Louis had no children, he leaves behind many intellectual heirs. I am proud to say that I am one of them.

As we reflect on his life and work, what should Louis Sohn’s epitaph be? Louis himself once suggested that he be called the Man Who Loved Giraffes. He believed giraffes are the best kind of creature because, like Louis himself, they keep their feet on the ground, but their heads in the clouds._¹⁴ But I prefer the image offered by Louis’s friend, former Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who said: “One of [Louis Sohn’s] greatest contributions has been his courage in looking into the future—to look at what international law ought to become,” not just what it has been._¹⁵

And so, I believe, Louis Sohn’s epitaph should not be an answer, but a question. In the twenty-first century, do we still have his courage—to look not at what international law has been, but rather, at what it ought to become?

^₁ Louis B. Sohn, Dr. Koh as a Student, in KOH KWANG LIM: ESSAYS IN HONOR OF HIS HWEGAP 46, 46 (Howard Kyongju Koh ed., 1980).
^₂ At lunch he invariably ordered the same thing: kung pao chicken with pignolia nuts. Indeed, we came to think that he ordered the dish simply so that he could say aloud the word “pignolia,” the sound of which he very much enjoyed.
^₃ See Jo M. Pasqualucci, Louis Sohn: Grandfather of International Human Rights Law in the United States, 20 HUM. RTS. Q. 924, 931 (1998) (“Sohn played several supporting roles at the [San Francisco] Conference. One, he assisted the rapporteur of the drafting committee for the Statute of the International Court of Justice by writing the report of the negotiations. In that final report he took care to include the provision for the continuation of jurisdiction from the [Permanent Court of Inter-national Justice] to the [International Court of Justice] that he had suggested at the Second Dumbar-ton Oaks Conference. Two, he sorted the massive number of documents delivered to the Ethiopian Delegation in return for a complete set of the conference documents for himself. Three, he provided advice. Sohn was becoming known for his encyclopedic knowledge of international law, and he was periodically asked for legal precedent.”).
^₄ Id. at 937–38.
^₅ See generally OONA HATHAWAY & HAROLD HONGJU KOH, FOUNDATIONS OF INTERNATIONAL LAW AND POLITICS 173–204 (2006); Harold Hongju Koh, Transnational Legal Process, 75 NEB. L. REV. 181 (1996); Harold Hongju Koh, Why Do Nations Obey International Law?, 106 YALE L.J. 2599 (1997).
^₆ See GRENVILLE CLARK & LOUIS B. SOHN, WORLD PEACE THROUGH WORLD LAW (2d ed. 1960).
^₇ See Thomas Buergenthal, Preface to CONTEMPORARY ISSUES IN INTERNATIONAL LAW: ESSAYS IN HONOR OF LOUIS B. SOHN, at VII (Thomas Buergenthal ed., 1984) (“When we were students, some of Louis Sohn’s ideas . . . used to strike us as unrealistic, impractical, visionary. Over the years, many of us have come to recognize that more often than not he has proved to be right in his perception of international relations.”).
^₈ Military and Paramilitary Activities (Nicar. v. U.S.), 1984 I.C.J. 392 (Nov. 26).
^₉ RESTATEMENT (THIRD) OF THE FOREIGN RELATIONS LAW OF THE UNITED STATES (1987). Especially of note are the chapters on the Law of the Sea and the Law of the Environment, on which Sohn served as principal author.
^₁₀ See Kathleen Teltsch, Harvard Professor the “Guru” of Sea Law Talks, N.Y. TIMES, July 16, 1977, at 4.
^₁₁ Pasqualucci, supra note 3, at 936.
^₁₂ United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea Annex VII, Dec. 10, 1982, 1833 U.N.T.S. 397.
^₁₃ See Louis B. Sohn, The New International Law: Protection of the Rights of Individuals Rather than States, 32 AM. U. L. REV. 1, 1–16 (1982).
^₁₄ Pasqualucci, supra note 3, at 944.
^₁₅ Dean Rusk, Introduction, 24 INT’L LAW, 619 (1990).

Article*

My deep sense of affection for Louis Sohn is hard to explain, since we never got to know one another well, either professionally or personally. I was his student in the late 1970s, in his last years at Harvard, and I worked as his research assistant on and off, most steadily while studying for the bar exam in the summer of 1980. He spent much of that summer in Geneva working on the Law of the Sea Treaty, while his secretary and I held down the fort. Although I think I took all of his courses and spent many hours in his warren of offices on the second floor of the International Legal Studies building, I don’t remember our ever discussing ideas in a way that would have allowed us to explore one another’s point of view. I know that Louis read a number of articles I wrote about international law and institutions over the ensuing years—evaluating me for tenure, among other things—but I don’t recall his sharing his reactions with me.

As a result, I have never succeeded in describing the bond that connects me to Louis to my satisfaction, and it may well elude me here. It may all be as simple as gratitude. He took me under his wing in law school and seemed to think it natural to be interested in all things foreign and to be quite disinterested in the details of the peculiar American constitutional arrangement. Legend has it that my appointment as an assistant professor began when Louis recommended to then-Dean Sacks that I take over his courses after he reached the then mandatory retirement age. I was still a third-year student, and Louis never mentioned this to me. When the Dean called me in during the summer after graduation, I worried there had been some mistake on my transcript. When Al Sacks told me, in his own roundabout way, that Louis had suggested I might be interested in an “appointment with the school,” I assumed he meant some kind of alumni position, and graciously declined—I was on my way to Washington to practice.

I had my first serious conversation with Louis when he returned from Geneva and called me in to straighten things out. That afternoon may have been the first time I thought of Louis not as a teacher or legal scholar, but as a co-conspirator. It was a pretty oblique conversation, but I left it feeling that Louis and I were part of the same secret society, working together in an unspoken common resistance to the parochial establishment—at Harvard, in the United States, across the world. He said he hoped I’d take over his courses on international and United Nations law and thought I’d be “fine at it.” He didn’t say why he thought so or offer any advice about how or what I should teach. He just thought I’d be “fine.” He said I would probably need to write something—perhaps I could take a fellowship and do that. The whole thing took about five minutes, and then we turned back to work.

He told me about Geneva and negotiations over the dispute resolution sections of the Law of the Sea Treaty. His story jump cuts texts and people. He’d offer textual suggestions and precedents to this or that diplomat, assess their response, be back to them the next day with something slightly different. Perhaps, he’d say, the way they approached the problem in this obscure maritime arbitration could be useful. The result of his labor in Geneva would be an elegant cornucopia of different dispute resolution mechanisms. It was the procedures that fascinated him—finding ways that people could feel comfortable coming together to resolve their differences, an endless evolving smorgasbord for states and diplomats with conflicts and tensions.

I knew that Louis had a reputation for being a dreamer, an idealist, a utopian. But when we spoke, he never put things in such general terms. We were always looking for a text that might offer a way out of this or that practical impasse. He would pull something out that he thought might be useful, and I’d look for precedents and alternative drafts, sorting our way through the deep piles that filled his three small rooms. It all seemed quite practical to me, if part of a world I knew nothing about. Louis was at home everywhere in the world of U.N. conferences and international administration, and he was always quite precise about the ways in which political interests had led people here or there into an administrative tangle. Somewhere in his pile of texts would be a practical way out.

In law school, I thought myself hard-boiled and realistic about things, and I’m sure I considered Louis’s nineteen-fifties fantasy of World Peace Through World Law daft. But I never heard Louis mention his work with Grenville Clark. It was already long ago. He was working on this week’s problems, on the upcoming negotiations about environmental law or human rights, or on the administrative procedures of the U.N. staff tribunals. Many years later, Nathaniel Berman and I took Louis out to dinner and asked him about his experiences in Cambridge during the Second World War. Having come to work briefly as a research assistant, he found himself alone in a foreign country through the war as knowledge of the Holocaust came to light. He responded to our interest by recounting the specific bits of the Harvard Research draft codifications of international law he was working on at the time with Manley Hudson, implying somehow that he was too busy to have thought much about the war or his home front. Tragedy and dislocation had not marked him with sadness or earnestness. If anything, the opposite—the worst had been, and now we could take delight in the work of moving on.

Building a new world—it was slow, painstaking work, rooted in detail. Louis kept a parallel card catalog of every book purchased by the International Legal Studies library—books went straight from acquisitions to his office, where his secretary would type up the cards while he perused the new stock. By the time he returned from Geneva, quite a pile had accumulated and we looked through them together. He passed quickly over the academic studies and theories. He was most interested in reports of what had actually been accomplished in this or that organization and in the compilations of documents. But the academic volumes were always good for an impish chuckle, as he’d sum up the provincial preoccupations of this or that rival in a word or two.

I don’t know just how Louis differed, or felt he differed, from McDougal or Gross or Henkin or any of the other international law scholars of the time. He never said in so many words. As in all secret societies, much was unspoken. He would wink and nod and chuckle, and then we’d be back searching for a text. What did come through was his powerful ethical vision and sensibility. Louis stood, sans peur et sans reproche, for an ethics that measured merit, function, and value in ways altogether different from his American and international law colleagues. I would not have said that so clearly at the time—they were all humanists, liberals, cosmopolitan intellectuals of one or another kind. But their world was somehow smaller and older than Louis’s, cramped by defeat and hemmed in by what passed as realism. Louis may have worked one document at a time, but he was no small-scale reformer, no moderate about how far we had yet to go.

When I was his student, Harvard Law School was intellectually preoccupied with big methodological battles. American political and legal liberalism was being put on the defensive. The prestige of courses in federal courts and the legal process was waning. Constitutional law was the new status course, displacing federal courts and procedure. The big ideas resided in liberal theory and law and economics and critical legal studies.

All this seemed to pass Louis by completely. In class and out, with his wry humor and puckish grin, Sohn gave the impression of someone who knew a secret, something terribly funny and a bit naughty. This was the secret: he was part of another world, where all this didn’t matter a whit.

Louis was never a faculty baron at Harvard—the school seemed to look right through him. Louis seemed to take it all in stride, but I have often wondered what it was like to work for so many years in an institution whose priorities and methods and cultural sensibility were simply not his. That afternoon in his office, he admonished me not to take the place too seriously and to focus on the real work. Your significance for international affairs, he said, will increase exponentially with your distance from Harvard Square. The great work is elsewhere.

Louis easily hid his humanist conspiracy in plain sight. A short, bald man with a soft foreign accent, he spoke a bit too quietly to be a forceful presence, even in his own office. There was nothing flashy about him, except maybe his beret. Holed up in the International Legal Studies building, he seemed a stranger in a strange land—his intellectual and political engagements quite different from those of his colleagues. At the time, he taught the law of the sea, international law and various U.N. law courses, all to quite small groups in the International Legal Studies seminar room outside his offices. He was neither well-known nor much respected by my cohort of J.D. students. Louis was working on a vast imaginary project to build up international law’s potential and institutional possibility to express his cosmopolitan hope for a better world. Huh? And he was doing it one document, one textual precedent, at a time, recording the institutional innovations of many dozen working organizations so that they could be remembered and repeated and revised. It is hard to think of a project less likely to connect with a generation of students preoccupied with dissecting the latest filigree on theories of adjudication that might ground the liberal predilections of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Many of the foreign students were part of his world, and he supervised dozens and dozens of L.L.M. and S.J.D. dissertations. I have repeatedly run into diplomats from one small country or another who remember coming to Cambridge to meet with Professor Sohn. They would have discussed new ideas for revising this or that procedure in the U.N. system, progress on the drafting or adoption of this or that human rights instrument, reporting their experiences in this or that sub-commission or administrative tribunal. Louis would always ask them for documents—did they have the text of the resolution, or a copy of the rules of procedures? And he would file them away.

He worked quietly and steadily, sorting his remarkable collection of public documents—rumor had it that he was a U.N. depository library all on his own, it was said because he had been “at San Francisco” when the Charter was drafted. He compiled casebooks and document collections. I know I thought him obsessed with documents. By the time I worked with him, they had really begun to stack up—dozens and dozens of piles seven or eight feet tall, lining the floor two piles deep in front of metal shelving jammed to the ceiling with still more, until three rooms were at capacity. And he knew where things were. If a student was working on a paper and some sub-commission had once issued a report on the same topic, he would burrow through the piles and he’d find it.

Looking back, I realize that these were not just documents. For Louis, they were a record of imagination, innovation, evidence of a project for a better world being born. Although his family had perished in the Holocaust, he was not stockpiling evidence of a crime. He was saving evidence of the new world he believed was being built. Did that make him a dreamer? It certainly made him an inspiration.

I never shared Louis’s affection for the U.N., nor his passion for documents. But I did, and still do, share his dream of a just world made one. Louis was as whimsical as they come, but his ethical moorings ran deep, forged by experience and sunk in his heart. Yet he wore his ethics lightly, not at all a burden or a censor on his imagination and sense of fun. That afternoon, he reported his conversations with Dean Sacks in a conspiratorial whisper, his eyes twinkling. I got the sense he felt that retiring, slipping me onto the faculty, would be our little caper, good fun. Louis encouraged me to take a Sheldon Fellowship in Europe after graduation to write up my third-year paper as an article, and he arranged for me to be hosted at an international law institute in Germany. When I returned a year later to teach, he was gone. In the first years, he would return to campus every semester or so to meet with doctoral students he was still supervising, and we would have lunch. Eventually, his visits stopped.

I have wondered if he thought he made a mistake, entrusting an American Midwesterner with his Harvard courses. I have certainly taken a different intellectual path. But my thoughts have often turned to Louis in my office—most powerfully when I chuckle and wink with my own students and try to share the conspiratorial promise that we might indeed live in a very different world. All we have to do is wink and think it so.

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