Theodor Meron

CHARLES HOMER HASKINS PRIZE LECTURE FOR 2008 A Life of Learning Theodor Meron ACLS OCCASIONAL PAPER, No. 65 ACLS The 2008 Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecture was presented at the ACLS Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh, PA, on May 9, 2008. © 2008 by Theodor Meron CONTENTS On Charles Homer Haskins iv Haskins Prize Lecturers v Brief Biography of vi Theodor Meron Introduction ix by Pauline Yu A Life of Learning 1 by Theodor Meron ON CHARLES HOMER HASKINS Charles Homer Haskins (1870-1937), for whom the ACLS lecture series is named, was the first chairman of the American Council of Learned Societies, from 1920 to 1926. He began his teaching career at the Johns Hopkins University, where he received the B.A. degree in 1887, and the Ph.D. in 1890. He later taught at the University of Wisconsin and at Harvard, where he was Henry Charles Lea Professor of Medieval History at the time of his retirement in 1931, and dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences from 1908 to 1924. He served as president of the American Historical Association in 1922, and was a founder and the second president of the Medieval Academy of America (1926). A great American teacher, Charles Homer Haskins also did much to establish the reputation of American scholarship abroad. His distinction was recognized in honorary degrees from Strasbourg, Padua, Manchester, Paris, Louvain, Caen, Harvard, Wisconsin, and Allegheny College, where in 1883 he had begun his higher education at the age of 13. iv HASKINS PRIZE LECTURERS 2008 Theodor Meron 2007 Linda Nochlin 2006 Martin E. Marty 2005 Gerda Lerner 2004 Peter Gay 2003 Peter Brown 2002 Henry A. Millon 2001 Helen Vendler 2000 Geoffrey Hartman 1999 Clifford Geertz 1998 Yi-Fu Tuan 1997 Natalie Zemon Davis 1996 Robert William Fogel 1995 Phyllis Pray Bober 1994 Robert K. Merton 1993 Annemarie Schimmel 1992 Donald W. Meinig 1991 Milton Babbit 1990 Paul Oskar Kristeller 1989 Judith N. Shklar 1988 John Hope Franklin 1987 Carl E. Schorske 1986 Milton V. Anastos 1985 Lawrence Stone 1984 Mary Rosamond Haas 1983 Maynard Mack BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF THEODOR MERON Since his election to the Tribunal by the U.N. General Assembly in March 2001, Judge Meron, a citizen of the United States, has served on the Appeals Chamber, which hears appeals from both the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Between March 2003 and November 2005 he served as president of the Tribunal. A leading scholar of international humanitarian law, human rights, and international criminal law, Judge Meron wrote some of the books and articles that helped build the legal foundations for international criminal tribunals. A Shakespeare enthusiast, he has also written articles and books on the laws of war and chivalry in Shakespeare's historical plays. Judge Meron immigrated to the United States in 1977. Prior to that he served in the Israeli Foreign Service where his duties included that of Legal Adviser and the Ambassador to Canada and to the United Nations in Geneva. Since 1977, .udge Meron has been a professor of international law and, since 1994, the holder of the Charles L. Denison Chair at New York University School of Law. In 2000-2001, he served as Counselor on International Law in the U.S. Depart- ment of State. Between 1991 and 1995 he was also Professor of International Law at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, and he has been a Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard and at the University of California (Berkeley). Hle received his legal education at the universities of Jerusalem, Harvard (where he received his doctorate), and Cambridge. In 2006, he was named Charles L. Denison Professor Emeritus and Judicial Fellow at the New York University Law School. He was co-editor-in-chief of the American Journal of International Law (1993-98) and is now an honorary editor. He i1 is a member of the Board of Editors of the Yearbook of Interna- tional Humanitarian Law, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Society of International Law, the French Society of International Law, the American Branch of the International Law Association, the Bar of the State of New York, and of the Shakespeare Institute. He has served on the advisory committees or boards of several human rights organizations, including Americas Watch and the International League for Human Rights. In 1990, he served as a public member of the United States Delegation to the CSCE Conference on Human Di- mensions in Copenhagen. In 1998, he served as a member of the United States Delegation to the Rome Conference on the Establish- ment of an International Criminal Court (ICC) and was involved in the drafting of the provisions on crimes, including war crimes and crimes against humanity. He has also served on the preparatory commission for the establishment of the ICC, with particular respon- sibilities for the definition of the crime of aggression. He has served on several committees of experts of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), including those on Internal Strife, on the Environment and Armed Conflicts, and on Direct Participation in Hostilities Under International Humanitarian Law. He was also a member of the steering committee of ICRC experts on Custom- ary Rules of International Humanitarian Law. He is a member of the "Panel of Eminent Persons within the Swiss Initiative to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights." HIe has been a Carnegie Lecturer at The Hague Academy of International Law, Fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation, Max Planck Institute Fellow (Heidelberg), Sir Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lecturer at the University of Cambridge, and Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He has lectured at many universities and at the International Institute of Human Rights (Strasbourg). He helped establish the ICRC/Graduate Institute of International Studies Seminars for University Professors on Inter- national Humanitarian Law. He leads the annual ICRC seminars for U.N. diplomats on International Humanitarian Law at NYU, and in the past led such seminars in Geneva. He is a member vii of the Institute of International Law. He was awarded the 2005 Rule of Law Award by the International Bar Association and the 2006 Manley O. Hudson Medal of the American Society of Inter- national Law. He was made Officer of the Legion of Honor by the President of France in 2007. His books are Investment Insurance in InternationalLaw (Oceana-Sijthoff, 1976); The United Nations Secretariat (Lexington Books, 1977); Human Rights in InternationalLaw (Oxford Univer- sity Press, 1984); Human Rights Law-Making in the United Nations (Oxford University Press, 1986) (awarded the certificate of merit of the American Society of International Law); Human Rights in Internal Strife: Their International Protection (Sir Hersch Lauter- pacht Memorial Lectures, Grotius Publications, 1987); Human Rights and HumanitarianNorms as Customary Law (Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1989); Henry's Wars and Shakespeare's Laws (Oxford University Press, 1993); Bloody Constraint: War and Chivalry in Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 1998); War Crimes Law Comes of Age: Essays (Oxford University Press, 1998), and Interna- tional Law In the Age of Human Rights (Martinus Nijhoff, 2004). His latest book, The Humanization of InternationalLaw, appeared in 2006 (Hague Academy of International Law and Nijhoff). A frequent contributor to the American Journal of Inter- national Law and other legal journals, he delivered the 2003 General Course of Public International Law at The Hague Academy of International Law. viii INTRODUCTION In his essay on "Crimes and Accountability in Shakespeare," Judge Theodor Meron explains how "Shakespeare's plays advocate a society in which the law should be respected and leaders held to high standards of civilized behavior. He emphasizes moral duties and the role of conscience as a guide to civilized behavior by the leader and the citizen." The same could be said about Judge Meron himself, as someone who has helped to establish the standards of civilized behavior and law in his capacities as the president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (from 2003-2005), as a presiding judge of the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and as a scholar and teacher of international law at New York University's School of Law. For Judge Meron, jurisprudence takes both theoretical and practical form, as his scholarship in international law both informs and is informed by an active en- gagement in the field of human rights on a global scale. Judge Meron's words resonate with the purpose of the Haskins Prize Lecture. When John William Ward became president of the American Council of Learned Societies in 1982, he sought to commemorate the ACLS tradition of commitment to scholarship and teaching of the highest quality with an annual lecture. Each year since, we have asked the lecturer "... to reflect on a lifetime of work as a scholar, on the motives, the chance determinations, the satisfac- tions (and the dissatisfactions) of the life of learning, to explore through one's own life the larger, institutional life of scholarship. We do not wish the speaker to present the products of one's own scholarly research, but rather to share with other scholars the personal process of a particular lifetime of learning." ix Judge Meron's lecture is the twenty-sixth in this series, which is named for Charles Homer Haskins, the first chairman of ACLS. It is the responsibility of the Executive Committee of the Delegates of ACLS to nominate each year's Haskins lecturer. After searching deliberations, the delegates fixed firmly and enthusi- astically on Theodor Meron as someone who is not only a leading figure in the scholarship of international law but also deeply committed to its practice and development today.

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