 It is my great pleasure to welcome you here for the third in our Lauterpacht Center Lectures. And you know it's an odd coincidence, they are called the Lauterpacht Center Lectures and who do we have, Sir Elihu Lauterpacht here today. As you all know, he is the founder of the center, but the history of his name in relation to international law in the University of Cambridge goes back longer, reaches back even to the period of his own birth. Because today Elihu has presented to us the doctoral degree in law originally granted to his father, Sir Hersch Lauterpacht. And I think we are all very pleased and proud to receive this and will exhibit it proudly in this center. So this is Hersch's first degree, of course he had several others including a doctorate in political science from the same university and later an LAD from this university a degree that Elihu himself has recently obtained from this university. As you know Elihu combines uniquely a number of features that make international law special. International law is special because in the ordinary run of things you will find that those who do international law by international law I mean proper international law, not money law but public international law. Those who practice in that area tend to be the nicest kinds of people you could possibly encounter on this planet. Now wherever you go around the world where you meet public international lawyers inevitably at some stage they have studied under Elihu Lauterpacht. Remember Judge Schwebel the sometimes president of the International Court of Justice himself the figure of quite considerable and senior standing he was one of Elihu's very first students who recounts very fondly how he was supervised by Elihu in Trinity College many years ago. And it is typical of Elihu that wherever you go you have those whose career somehow started with Elihu giving them the crucial impetus the crucial kick upwards on the ladder to start their career. We recently had occasion to celebrate not only his 80th birthday but some years afterwards was it your 60th year of practice at the bar Elihu is now I think in his 62nd year of practice so for all of you who are just about to qualify you can see that the career as an international lawyer is a long one and intellectually and in other ways rewarding one. But he has had contact with, has administered, has run has had a leading role in all of the functions that we could possibly imagine. He obviously is one of the keenest sought after advocates and councils before in particular international courts and tribunals as soon as there's a sniff or whiff of an emerging international law case there's a race towards the three, four or five leading public international lawyers to sign them up before the other side does so and generally speaking it will be Elihu's telephone that rings first that one wants to make sure to be represented at this kind of high level. Elihu has been council advocate in a large number of ICJ proceedings and other important international cases. He himself has sat as arbitrators in the number of Atok and even standing tribunals and he has served as judge Atok on the International Court of Justice. In terms of his scholarly work well you're all familiar with his important book on the International Administration of Justice his numerous other writings he has edited five volumes of collected papers of his father Sir Hirsch Lauterpark and only recently he has published an excellent and much internationally noted biography of his father. So all in all I think 60 or more years of practice reflected in an amazing range of achievements and for us of course the most significant achievement is this very building here is the Lauterpark centre that bears his name and rightly so because he founded it as a basis for international law in this university in this country and worldwide. Elihu it gives me great pleasure to hand the floor over to you in your own home. Well you are all very kind to be here I must say I have never seen this room so full and as I ponder on the situation I can see no good reason for it except a love of antiques but the fact is that before I came here before I came here I had the advantage of looking in the times today and there was a useful article what England should do to avoid another World Cup snore draw and the valuable information in it was that I'm not surprised says the author of this little article that players take caffeine before kickoff a shot of caffeine an hour or two before endurance exercise like running, cycling or football has been shown to improve stamina and is widely used in a variety of disciplines where caffeine isn't banned and so I'm hoping that the caffeine that I took an hour or so ago will see me through the session I must admit to being a little bit embarrassed by an episode that focuses on me so personally I should be talking about myself and I doubt if you will get any great substantive knowledge from what I'm about to say but it may amuse you to hear about little episodes Cambridge has been a centre of international law for a long time not simply on account of my father or myself but we've had Arnold McNair here for some years and he was a very great man you'll see his name you'll have read some of his work he was a man of special character of great moral rectitude and at the same time humility and restraint and he was a shrewd man I remember he called me in once in his 80s and he said to me and he said I want to sell my library how do you suggest that I should do it my reply was oh you shouldn't be selling your library after all it's so much part of your life to which he responded don't you worry about me I've already sold one library but anyway so we've had McNair here and subsequent to him Robbie Jennings and then a bit other distinguished people like Clive Perry whose name should not be forgotten and likewise Court Lipstein who lived to the age of 96 or 97 and some of you may have had the pleasure of seeing him in the library well I will divide my approach to recollections into little bits and I'll start with people I've mentioned McNair one name that sticks in my mind because he was a rather impressive person it's that of Henri Rollin R-O-L-I-L who was a Belgian international lawyer and my contact with him occurred during the Barcelona Traction case which is a case of some notoriety and he was the leader of the team then being over 80 and his vigor and the concentration were much to be admired there are other international lawyers who also ought to be mentioned from Cambridge of which one is a Jenks CW Jenks, Wilfrid Jenks who left Cambridge and went straight away into the service of the International Labour Office in Geneva and gradually moved up through the legal division of that organisation until he eventually became Director General which was a great achievement and a recognition of the fact that his contribution was more than merely legal but he was a progressive and creative thinker and a first-class international draftsman another name, not a Cambridge name but one associated with us through his writings is that of the late Shabtai Rosen whose book on the International Court of Justice is of such splendour and he died only a few months ago at the age of 96 still writing, so he's a great man so my recollections cover a lot of people but I want to move on now to my own involvement in academic matters I confess I've never written a major textbook that was perhaps a mistake but I didn't have the stamina, vigor of other people of which one is upstairs, James Crawford who is remarkable for his literary as well as his professional achievements but I recall that my father was anxious in his later years that I should take over the editing of Oppenheim after he ceased to edit it and my attitude was really rather cheeky I said, I'll write my own book I don't want to edit somebody else's book and that result was I didn't edit Oppenheim and I didn't write my own book but that's how it went I've written a number of smaller pieces one of which I'm quite proud because it was an early analysis of the legal basis on which the state of Israel came into existence that was called Jerusalem and the Holy Places which I wrote in about 1967 another academic contribution was my creation of the British practice in international law this was a series that I began in I suppose it wasn't about 1953 or thereabouts and it was intended initially as a supplement to the international comparative law quarterly and that was quite novel in its time sufficiently novel to attract attention and insistence upon its regular appearance and it was that regular appearance in which I failed because while I was away in Australia something to which I'll come in due course it fell behind rather seriously it was simply stolen by a group of British academics who might have known better but in fact achieved something better and it now appears as the item Uckmil, UK materials on international law in the annual volumes of the British yearbook very well edited by Colin Warbrick and others so I have no complaint to make I just would like people to know that I had a hand in its creation also when my father passed away in 1960 I inherited the editorship of the international law reports which I think are visible somewhere in here and I'm glad to say we've now reached volume 150 and it's a very good series it's suffering some competition from an Oxford publication which happily I cannot recall the exact title and also of course access to material via the internet is now so easy that research takes place on a entirely different plane but in the preparation of the international law reports I was initially helped by Julian White who then went on to become professor of international law at Manchester and then she took a very sensible step she got married and left and she's now in Australia in the later years of matrimony but her place was taken in 1978 by Christopher Greenwood who as you all know is now as Sir Christopher Greenwood the British judge at the international court and he together with the assistants of Karen Lee have continued to produce the series thank goodness without any interference from me In 1959 and 1960 I went off to The Hague to be the director of the English speaking section of the research facility at The Hague in the period following each summer's series of lectures there is a period of research in which there are two groups of about two dozen members each under the direction of somebody and in 1959 and 1960 that was myself and we dealt with things like the law of treaties and the law of the sea and it was for me a very encouraging experience because amongst those who were in the group Eastern European, Polish, Russian and other international lawyers whose acquaintance with an understanding of international jurisprudence was very limited and I was delighted that in the course of those weeks together they began to absorb the habit of reference to international cases as a companion if not a substitute for mere theory and doctrinal research and then after the oh I went on I keep on forgetting I went on myself to give a series of lectures at The Hague Academy on the development of the law of international organization through the decisions of international tribunals and I wish that I'd expanded that into something firmer recently as Mark has just told us I prepared a biography of my late father which was a for me psychologically cathartic exercise because it was really about my relationship with him he was an excellent father and obviously had made his mind up that I should be an international lawyer at a very early age and so from I think the age of 12 or 13 onwards I was receiving letters with instructions as to what I should be reading there was an awful lot of it and I'm sure that some of it did me some good and then he nursed me along I managed to get into Trinity and I did my undergraduate studies and then what is now the LLM and very quickly was able to move into a more practical field because at that time they had been established I'm not talking about 1950 and of course that must seem to you to be centuries ago I mean we're talking about things that happened something years ago and if I look backwards from when I started 60 years that takes me back almost to Napoleon I got an early foothold I was appointed as joint secretary of a committee on state immunity that had been established by the foreign office cabinet office to look into that subject having regard to the public distaste at the decision of a call of appeal in the case of Cryina versus the TASS news agency the chairman of that committee was Sir Donald Somerville a law justice of appeal a man of very strong temperament if I could put it that way who just decided he would write the report not the secretaries and his approach was regrettably rather limited so we ended up with a report limited to diplomatic immunity and only some aspects of it but one important aspect namely that of introducing into English law the freedom for the executive to retaliate if foreign governments limited the immunity enjoyed by our own personnel in their countries and we didn't really touch on the state immunity at all but for me it was a very interesting experience and that was that heralded my entering chambers in London as a pupil that was in November 1950 and I had as my pupil master an admirable person called John McGor who later became Sir John McGor a judge of the Court of Appeal and from him I learnt and it was an important piece of learning the skill in drafting technical material in a clear and understandable fashion I was very glad of that and I was his pupil for two years and then I was admitted as a member of those chambers they were then three Essex Court of which I'm still a member even though they moved from Essex Court to Essex Street and while I was with John McGor that came into his list of items to work on a brief about a boat called the Rosemary Rosemary was a tanker that had picked up oil in Iran and was carrying it to Europe now as background to that you have to be aware that in 1950 or 51 the Iranians had nationalised the oil industry which meant effectively nationalising BP a low compensation was forthcoming it was therefore certainly prima facie it's not actually a violation of international law now against that background BP had advertised in the press of the world saying if anybody buys oil from Iran that derives from the area of our concessions then we will sue them for that oil so here was the little rosemary carrying a small cargo of oil from Amman down to possibly Italy but its engines broke down and it got stuck and it had to put into port in Aden that was then a British colony and so without hesitation and with all due speed BP sent John McGor out to Aden to administer the legal proceedings being brought against the ship and its charters for the detention of the oil but John McGor a wise man though he was did not actually know any international law and indeed it's a reflection of the attitude of the bar at that time that international law was not widely known and was rather looked down on was disdained as a sort of academic practical subject of no practical value well luckily I was able to help him I drafted notes for him and in the proceedings in Aden subsequently reported in the weekly law reports he put forward the argument that oil derived from the Iranian fields in violation of international law could not legally be transferred to any other person in other words it was a case that attacked a very fundamental case in British private international law namely the case of Luther against Sago Luther and Sago was his authority for the proposition that when you're judging title to objects then that title must be judged by reference to the law of the place where the goods were situate at the time of the questionable transfer in other words it was the Lex Cetus as it is known now if the Lex Cetus had been applied to the Rosemary situation BP could not have recovered the oil because Lex Cetus was Iranian law at the time of the transfer to the owner of the vessel and so Luther and Sago would have been the end of the matter but we managed to engraft onto Luther and Sago the very significant qualification that where the transfer even under the law of the place where the goods were situate was contrary to international law precluded any other state or court from accepting its validity and I'm glad to think that I had a hand in that development and in 1953 and the years following it was first of all it was very difficult for the English bar to accept it and there were always a few places that followed qualifications by judges on the subject but the idea spread and it was eventually applied in the United States and is the foundation of the United States Alien Torts Act so as I say that was a very interesting beginning to my career well then I think I started out in this section of my talk under the head of academic contributions and I've veered off into practice but as part of academic contributions I'd just like to go back and mention the fact that in 1978 on my return from a three-year spell in Australia as the legal advisor of their Department of Foreign Affairs I created a publishing company called Grocia's Publications Limited why? because at that time international law reports were being published by Mrs Butterworth's distinguished firm of legal publishers but I think they were disenchanted by my somewhat lackadaisical or as they thought lackadaisical approach to publishing schedules and so when they demonstrated with me I'd say well if it's such a bother to you I'll publish it myself and so I created Grocia's Publications Limited and we took over the publication of the international law reports and made quite a success of it and more than that we also published other works in the field of international law and we looked at the time of the in the Iraq crisis we managed to produce a document book in six weeks in most publishing houses today six weeks would be the period which would be taken just to turn over the pages of the draft manuscript but that was a success and we went on and produced other books in international law until eventually a situation developed in which I had to choose myself between just becoming a publisher or continuing in my career in international law and so I was able to dispose of Grocia's Publications Limited to the Cambridge University Press of whom the current and most effective representative is present here in the form of Fanola O'Sullivan and we're very grateful to them for keeping us going I hope they'll be able to do so indefinitely then still reverting to activity on the academic side it was suggested to me in 1983 by the then Professor Sir Robert Jennings who became his successor Professor Bowett and Clive Perry who was also here then that we should have a centre for international law which I would create and administer well as you probably all know money is a useful driving force in the creation and maintenance of such establishments so the International Law Centre was centred in my study in my house in Herschel Road for some years and was all done from there with the help of my secretary and initially we used to try and promote research work and one of the most significant product of our has been the massive study on Ixid prepared by Professor Schreuer of Jena who was one of our LLB students here in my early years who has gone on to significant prominence in the field so we established what was then called the Research Centre for International Law in 1983 we managed to acquire the building behind you in 1986 when we bought it it was unfortunately the most expensive house to change hands in Cambridge and at that time it cost us £350,000 which was a lot of money but those of you who may have examined the Cambridge property market at the present time would realise that prices are now very much higher and a building like that would be in the probably about a couple of million pounds and then subsequently with the benefit of a grant from the widow of Tom Finley whose portrait hangs on the wall we were able to build this extension and the upper floor of it which we call the Snyder study room was the gift of Earl Snyder an American Air Force Officer who acquired an interest in international law and wanted to see it promoted and then some years later not due to any initiative on my part as the name of the centre was changed to Laudepark centre in acknowledgement not on my role but on my father's role in the advancement of international law in Cambridge so I could move on from academic to some of the practical applications of international law within my recollection and I use that phrase within my recollection because I probably have forgotten more than I remember I've told you about the Rosemary and the train of developments initiated there but I also then became quite involved in international law in the investment sphere at that time Shell and a number of other major international companies about the development of international law and in particular of the rules relating to the protection of investment and so an informal organisation was established called API the association for promotion and protection of international investment and it was based in Geneva and the person who administered it was the late Michael Brandon who was an old friend of mine and who had been up here with me and Michael had set up as a lawyer in Geneva and was used by the companies to administer this scheme and he very generously has having died sadly just a few months ago has bequeathed money for the creation of the Michael Brandon fellowships within this centre. I don't know who are the current holders but I wish them but wish them well and so I got involved in the work of API and drafting draft agreements for the protection of property they didn't get very far unfortunately as such the basic idea was picked up by Ronnie Brosches the then general council of the World Bank in Washington and he showing great initiative moved around the world encouraging states to subscribe to a draft convention that he has prepared on the protection of foreign investment in reference to the substantive rules but by way of creating suitable jurisdictions in which disputes might be settled. So in due course in 1956 I think it was exiled the international centre for the settlement of investment disputes was established under the circumstances of the World Bank and I was bad to have felt that I played some role in that I have skipped one item which I have attached importance to and that is my own participation in the solution of the nationalisation dispute with Iran as I mentioned earlier because in 1954 I was one of the council of 14 office representing the principal oil companies who went out to Tehran to negotiate an agreement for the settlement and that agreement was not only important in itself because it enabled the oil industry to be restarted in Iran but it was important also as a precedent for many other international oil concessions I myself was responsible for the drafting of the proper law clause with its reference to general principles of law and for the arbitration arrangements these were subsequently incorporated in many other agreements so I felt pleased about that but then let me move on to litigation as Mark indicated I have been involved in a lot of litigation I'm glad to think that my involvement is now diminishing because people rather look at your date of birth and then wonder whether you can survive long enough to participate in an international case because they all take so long I'll give you one illustration one illustration in 1954 this is an English case 1954 I signed the statement of claim in a case between the East German and the West German Zeiss a very interesting case the case went through various procedural stages until at first instance it eventually came for the Court of Justice in 1971 some 17 years later and was settled in the third week of the opening speech of the plaintiffs council why? because in those intervening years the political scene had changed entirely in 1954 the relationship between East and West Germany was very hostile in 1971 thankfully things had changed for the better so as I say people tend to look at the recruitment of council now by reference to date of birth rather than anything else there was a number of interesting cases there have been many interesting cases in which I've been involved one interesting one was the IMCO advisory opinion I forget who it was but it was in the first year of the establishment of that organization the International Maritime Consultative Organization now known as the International Maritime Organization and in that year there was a dispute at the very first session of the organization as to voting procedures and voting rights and there was a provision in the constitution for the election of a certain number of members of the ship owning nations and some states took the view that to be a ship owning nation qualified for treatment in this way you had actually to be a nation that owned ships whereas as you know there are a number of states notably Liberia and Panama that are flags of convenient states and the question was whether they should be included in this category and there was an advisory opinion sought and I'm glad to say that the side for which I acted namely the flags of convenient states prevailed and their entitlement to participate in the Maritime Safety Committee was acknowledged I would if I were able to go on indefinitely in this conversation if the conversation may be cool I would have come to an observation that may be of value to you and that is the desirability of patience and restraint in handling of cases and in particular in actual international proceedings in the improv case one of the judges asked the states who were appearing before the court how many tons of shipping were registered under the Liberian flag that question was put not only to the flags of convenient states but also to the states who were opposing their position after a day or two the British representative got up and said they didn't know that shipping was registered under the Liberian flag thus immediately placing themselves in a position in which they were not entitled or qualified to exercise a discretion because they did not know the underlying facts now my Liberian colleagues were ready to leap up and say we know and I said just wait I have answered and then you can answer pointing out the defect in their response so that was a matter of encouraging one's clients to be patient or restraint now I might pass on from there to the nuclear test case because they were interesting in 1972 Gough Whitlam became Prime Minister of Australia and with the assistance of Dan O'Connell an Australian who was then the Professor of International Law at Oxford decided that Australia would initiate proceedings in the International Court with a view to stopping the atmospheric nuclear tests that were being conducted by France on the island of Moro Roa in the Pacific well the first problem was a jurisdictional problem on what basis could the court's jurisdiction be invoked and the choice made was that of the system of the permanent court of arbitration that's not wrong perhaps not the first time I say, not the last DCIJ it was the General Act that's exercise, the General Act for several disputes now the General Act had been invoked by France in its own case against Norway in the so-called Norwegian loans case and vigorously pursued counsel, a legal advisor Andre Gros now by the time we got to the court in the nuclear test case Andre Gros was sitting on the bench and so I was able to direct my argument in favour of the relevance and applicability of the General Act towards Gros citing what Gros had himself said in the Norwegian loans case Gros did not like that at all and so he manifested his dislike by visibly reading the newspaper and he obviously did not like me and later on in 1979 it must have been when I was elected to the Astitutra until now at a time when Gros was president a meeting was being held in Athens the tradition in the Astitutra is that the newly elected member goes to the meeting and presents himself to the president which I did and Gros responded by saying I am glad to meet your father's son our relationship did not prosper after that there have been many other cases worth mentioning I suppose one that might adjust the music a bit is the Libya Malta case regarding the limitation in the waters of the Mediterranean states and Libya it was the prime aphasia case for the application of equidistance a median line between the two states but Libya sought a line much closer to the Maltese coast justifying that extended claim on the basis of the tectonic plates which underlay the ocean and their argument was that in due course these tectonic plates would either act or separate I can't remember which in such a way as to justify their additional claim they produced a memorandum by two geologists supporting their position and so the geologists were put on for class examination and so I was class examining them and my question to them was can you tell the court how long it might be before this development took place and they said or maybe a few million years and that resolved that is but as I say there have been lots of cases with lots to tell you about but I think I had better pause at that point if anybody wants to ask me questions I'd be happy to try and answer them within the limits of of my capacity as I entered the building today I was asked how I was and I said I am vertical vocal and visible the triple V to be known in the future I'd be glad to help if anybody wants to ask me questions thank you very much