Hersch Lauterpacht

Sir Hersch Lauterpacht QC was a prominent Polish-British international lawyer and judge at the International Court of Justice.

Lauterpacht was born into a Jewish family in the small town of Żółkiew, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Ukraine), near Lemberg, the capital of East Galicia. In 1911 his family moved to Lemberg. In 1915 he enrolled in the law school of the University of Lemberg; it is not clear whether he graduated. Lauterpacht himself later wrote that he had not been able to take the final examinations “because the university has been closed to Jews in Eastern Galicia". He then moved to Vienna, and then London, where he became an international lawyer. He obtained a PhD degree from the London School of Economics in 1925, writing his dissertation on Private Law Sources and Analogies of International Law, published in 1927.

By 1937 he had written several books on international law. He assisted in the prosecution of the defendants at the Nuremberg trials - helping to draft the British prosecutor's (Hartley Shawcross) speech. Lauterpacht was a member of the United Nations' International Law Commission from 1952 to 1954 and a Judge of the International Court of Justice from 1955 to 1960. In the words of former ICJ President Stephen M. Schwebel, Judge Sir Hersch Lauterpacht's "attainments are unsurpassed by any international lawyer of this century [...] he taught and wrote with unmatched distinction". Hersch's writings and (concurring and dissenting) opinions continue, nearly 50 years after his death, to be cited frequently in briefs, judgments, and advisory opinions of the World Court. He famously said "international law is at the vanishing point of law".