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Louis Sohn (1914 - 2006) : Pathfinder toward World Law

Louis Sohn, born 1 March 1914, was one of the basic pathfinders toward the development of world law. His Cases and Other Materials on World Law (Foundation Press, 1950) stressed the difference between "international law" which is born of treaties between two or more States and "world law" which is the composition, functions, powers and procedures of organs of the world society. World Law are norms and values which are binding on all States and individuals regardless if a State has ratified a specific treaty or not. Thus the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1948 Convention against Genocide are world law even if a State has not ratified the Genocide Convention. When a State joins the United Nations, it pledges to follow the norms set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, the Declaration as world law is binding on individuals and the administration of States which are not UN members such as Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistra, Nagorno-Karabakh, Kosovo and what may become States in eastern Ukraine.

Louis Sohn, who died in 2006, would no doubt be following current events in Ukraine with passion. He was born in Lviv, then part of the Austria-Hungarian Empire; the city became part of Poland during his youth and university studies, then part of the Soviet Union and now Ukraine - a testimony to the changing nature of States and nationality. In addition to having national identity imposed by a place of birth, Sohn was by birth considered a Jew - regardless of what his religious ideas may have been. In the Poland of his university studies of law, there was social discrimination against Jews, especially in the legal profession. He wanted to study in a country without the same restrictions. He received a fellowship to study at Harvard Law School in 1939 and was able to leave on a boat two weeks ahead of the German invasion. Both of his parents, who were medical doctors, were sent to concentration camps. His mother died there, and his father, his health broken by the camp experience, died shortly after the end of the Second World War. Thus, Sohn's advocacy of human rights as a core of world law was linked to direct experience.

At Harvard Law, he worked as an assistant to Manley O. Hudson who had been a judge on the Permanent Court of International Justice created by the League of Nations. Hudson, as a well-known professor of international law, was asked to be part of the US delegation to draft the UN Charter in San Francisco, and Hudson took Sohn along with him to help write the UN Charter. Sohn worked on the transformation of the Permanent Court of International Justice into the International Court of Justice - a reincarnation of the earlier court but now considered as an organ of the United Nations which was not the case for the League.

Sohn, having been present at the birth of the UN, understood both the strength and the limitations of the organization. The San Francisco conference which wrote the Charter in June 1945 worked while the war in the Pacific was still on. The preliminary work on the Charter had been done earlier - largely by US and English scholars. Some delegates, in particular those from Australia, were unhappy with the "take it or leave it" presentation of the Charter by the US and UK delegations. Australia insisted that the possibility of a review of the Charter would be on the UN agenda after 10 years of experience in 1955.

With the start of the Cold War and the hot Korean War of 1950, a good number of concerned individuals such as those in the United World Federalists began thinking about what a Charter Review Conference might propose. A prominent New York lawyer with government experience, Grenville Clark, had organized a meeting in 1945 at his home in New Hampshire to study the Charter and he again organized in 1953 a new conference in light of a possible 1955 Review. Clark and Sohn then worked together to write World Peace through World Law an article by article revision of the UN Charter with an emphasis on creating a strong disarmament authority and a UN police force under UN control. The proposals were widely discussed, although they came out as a book published by Harvard University Press only in 1958 with a somewhat revised edition in 1960.

The US and the Soviet Union had collaborated to push a Charter Review Conference in 1955 under the rug in exchange for agreeing to admit a large number of States who were waiting at the door, blocked by Cold War considerations.

Sohn was a pragmatist who continued to work for the transformation of international law into a system of world law based on an acceptance of common values and procedures that could be followed by all. He had two main concerns: disarmament and dispute settlement for the new Law of the Sea Treaty. It was around these two major concerns of his that I got to know him, and published one of his major essays on disarmament in Transnational Perspectives.

Sohn was on the US delegation for the Law of the Sea negotiations in the 1970s - a conference which met one year in New York and the next in Geneva where we would see each other. Sohn realized that the extension of national jurisdiction and especially the creation of exclusive economic zones of 200 miles would lead to disputes - as we see these days in the China seas among China and its neighbors. Thus, he worked hard to have dispute settlement procedures written into the Law of the Sea Treaty. His knowledge and fairness was recognized by many of the delegates, and his suggestions form the base of the dispute settlement procedures.

Sohn saw that world law is a constantly evolving process, based on vision and the importance of hope. It is up to us to continue on the path he set out.

René Wadlow


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