Background

Judge Schwebel, welcome to Berkeley.

Thank you.

Tell me a little about your legal background before you went to the Court of Justice. You received your legal education where?

At Cambridge University and at the Yale Law School.

What drew you into international law as a particular subfield once you had your academic degrees?

I was involved with international law before I had my academic degrees, actually, because when I was still in high school in New York City, I became transfixed with the founding of the United Nations here in San Francisco, and followed the conference very attentively. I was active in a student organization affiliated with what today has become the United Nations Association of the USA. It had a somewhat different title then.

When I went to Harvard College some months later, as a freshman I took part in founding a student organization called the United Nations Council of Harvard. In all my student years I was active in the UN student movement, and when I was graduated from Harvard, they were nice enough to give me a fellowship tenable anywhere in the British Commonwealth. I chose to go to Cambridge because the most eminent professor of international law then teaching in the English-speaking world, Professor [Sir Hersch] Lauterpacht, was teaching at Cambridge. I had a very formative year with him. But he said to me that you couldn't be an international lawyer if you weren't a lawyer, and so I had to go home and go to a proper law school. I went to Yale Law School.

Those were exciting times. The war was over and there was real hope for the possibility of what international law could do.

Yes, there was great hope in international institutions, most prominently represented by the UN, and in international law.

What then did you do with your legal degree? Did you "put out a shingle" and start practicing international law? How did you go about doing that?

I went to see my professor at Yale, Professor MacDougal, who is still thriving as Professor Emeritus at Yale, and asked him what next. He said that if you want to be an influential international lawyer, you've first got to establish your legal spurs and go to the best big firm that will take you. After interviewing at quite a number, finally one made me an offer and I joined it. I had a stroke of luck there, because just as I joined it, one of the largest international arbitrations of the century came into that firm. One Aristotle Socrates Onassis, of whom you've otherwise heard, concluded a contract with the King of Saudi Arabia which would have given him a monopoly on the shipment of oil from Saudi Arabia. That was anathema to the four American companies which then owned Ramco, including the founding company, well known in these parts, then Standard Oil of California, today, Chevron. Under their concession agreement was a provision for arbitral recourse in case of disagreement which was invoked for the first time, and the firm which [had hired me] was retained by Ramco as its council.

I found myself at the very bottom of what became a towering totem pole of international legal talent. At the top was Lord McNair, recently retired as President of the International Court of Justice. At the bottom was myself. I did the digging and labor and spent unending hours in the files of Ramco and the like. Well, that had led to a lifelong interest in international arbitration. I'm still very interested in arbitration.

After five years there, I was invited to join the Harvard Law faculty, I thought, to teach international law. When I arrived I found I was dragooned into teaching other things I found less congenial, and to which I was less well suited. And, when it turned out that President Kennedy was elected, and a significant number of eminent Harvard professors who were friends of his went to join his administration, I went in the wake of one of them who became the Legal Advisor of the State Department as the Assistant Legal Advisor for UN Affairs.

And that was ...

In 1961. The office of Legal Advisor at the State Department is a very great office and really practicing public international law. A lot of the work is done by assistant legal advisors who service a particular department or bureau of the State Department, and I did UN Affairs. That was very exciting, because our then Ambassador for UN Affairs was Adlai Stevenson, whom I had greatly admired from afar and welcomed the privilege of working with. So I was Legal Advisor at the State Department on UN Affairs, but also of the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, and spent a great deal of time in New York. I was at Governor Stevenson's elbow, for example, in the Cuban Missile Crisis when he made his famous speech about waiting until the Soviet Ambassador replied [to his question about whether or not there were missiles in Cuba], "until Hell freezes over." That kind of thing.

Was the law an important adjunct in cases like that when you were at the State Department?

Yes. I think you've put it just right, an important "adjunct." I wouldn't say that the law was the dominant factor in the disposition of international problems, at least in most cases, but it was a significant factor, as was illustrated by the Cuban Missile Crisis where the international law of the matter played a rather considerable role in the policy that the United States decided to pursue. Not of bombing the missile sites, but of seeking the quarantine endorsed by the Organization of American States.

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