Sir Elihu ‘Eli’ Lauterpacht
Prominent international lawyer whose research centre at Cambridge rivalled the best in the world
SIR ELIHU “ELI” LAUTERPACHT, who has died aged 88, was one of an outstanding generation of British international lawyers who combined scholarship and advocacy and for several decades dominated the world of public international law.
Possessing seemingly boundless energy, Lauterpacht was a natural innovator who did much to transform international law research and teaching. He relished taking on a seemingly unwinnable case or demonstrating that the received wisdom on a subject was wrong. Yet he also retained an almost boyish enthusiasm for his subject.
Lauterpacht particularly stood out for his elegant advocacy. In one case his opponent had assured the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that a cartographer’s royal warrant meant that the boundary shown on his map had been endorsed by the British government. Lauterpacht produced a tin of his favourite biscuits from Fortnum and Mason and asked whether their royal warrant meant that they reflected British government policy. The map was never mentioned again.
Elihu Lauterpacht was born on July 13 1928 in Cricklewood, north west London. His father, Sir Hersch Lauterpacht QC, was the most influential international lawyer of the mid-20th century, becoming Professor of International Law at Cambridge and a judge of the ICJ despite having arrived in England speaking almost no English. It was Hersch Lauterpacht who suggested to the chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, that there should be a new offence of “crimes against humanity”, which was duly introduced into the Nuremberg Statute.
The younger Lauterpacht was educated at Phillips Academy in Massachusetts and Harrow before reading Law at Cambridge, where he achieved first class honours as an undergraduate and then gained another First in the postgraduate LLB. In 1953 his college, Trinity, elected him to a fellowship at the remarkably early age of 25. That year also saw him make his debut as counsel before the ICJ
For the next 60 years Lauterpacht combined teaching at Cambridge with an enormously successful practice at the Bar. As a teacher he was renowned for his academic rigour and his ability to relate the theory of the subject to contemporary events. Generations of students from all corners of the world benefited not just from his teaching but from his kindness and hospitality. The UN, as well as foreign ministries, law firms and universities, filled up with his former protégés.
As a practitioner, he confined himself to international law but within that large field he could turn his hand to anything. By the time he took Silk in 1970 he had drafted oil concessions for the Middle East, tackled boundaries in Asia and South America, and argued the long-running and immensely complex case about the Carl Zeiss company where rival East and West German boards of directors laid claim to the company’s assets around the world.
Lauterpacht understood better than most the complex relationship between international law and politics, and believed it was essential that advice about international law should be factored into government decisionmaking. He had the opportunity to put these beliefs into practice in the mid1970s when the Australian government invited him to set up a legal advisers’ department in their Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He spent two years in Canberra as the first head of that department. During that period he also led the Australian delegation to the UN Conference on the Law of the Sea.
Returning to Cambridge in 1978, at a time when morale in the law faculty was low and resources very limited, he set out to revitalise it as a world-class centre for the study of international law and played an important part in the expansion of postgraduate teaching which took place in Cambridge during the 1980s.
Aware of the challenge posed by well-funded research centres like the Max Planck Institute in Germany, Lauterpacht set out to create an institution which would rival them. In the face of resistance on the part of some within the university bureaucracy, and initially providing much of the funding himself, in 1983 he founded the Research Centre for International Law.
For its first few years the centre existed only in his study but it soon acquired premises of its own and became a remarkable focus for research, aided by the publishing house Grotius Publications, which Lauterpacht established and which rapidly became a leader in the field. Grotius was bought up by the Cambridge University Press in 1994, but the close link with the centre remained.
Lauterpacht was a great success as director of the centre. Under his leadership it became home to international lawyers from a wide range of countries and backgrounds. He introduced a weekly lunchtime seminar at which students mixed with visiting scholars, judges of the various international courts and leading practitioners. On his retirement, the centre was renamed the Lauterpacht Centre as a tribute to him and to his father. He was made an Honorary Professor by the University and awarded the LLD for a highly acclaimed biography of his father.
Retirement brought no change in pace. He chaired the arbitration tribunal set up to establish the boundary between Ethiopia and the newly independent Eritrea, as well as some of the first tribunals under the North American Free Trade Area. He served as a Judge ad hoc at the ICJ for the early stages of the case concerning allegations of genocide during the fighting in Bosnia, and his separate opinion in that case remains a most important point of reference.
He also continued to appear as counsel before the ICJ. In his last case there, more than 60 years after his first appearance, he represented TimorLeste in challenging the seizure by Australia of papers relating to a maritime dispute between the two states. Although he was then 85 and had to address the Court seated, he was still an immensely powerful presence. He was appointed CBE in 1989 and knighted in 1998.
In 1955 Lauterpacht married Judith Hettinger, with whom he had two daughters and a son. She died in 1970 and in 1973 he married Catherine Daly, with whom he had another son. She and his children survive him.