In 1991 I attended a summer workshop for young international law and international relations teachers. Tom’s model of engaged advocacy for ordering the world on the basis of the rule of law so thoroughly captivated our interdisciplinary group that at our closing dance we improvised a new step, the “compliance pull,” in tribute to Tom’s response to why “powerful nations obey powerless rules” in what was then his latest book, The Power of Legitimacy Among Nations.

Over the years Tom became a friend, but he never ceased to intimidate me by virtue of his achievements. In addition to producing, on average, one book every 17.8 months for 43 years, Tom became the confidant of governments and secretaries general. He pushed the American Society of International Law to deepen its commitment to scholarship (eventually he became ASIL president), and he mentored hundreds of students, many of whom became leading lights in practice, government, or academe. Of course, Tom came into his own shortly after 9/11, when he courageously voiced support for law and multilateral cooperation when few, particularly in our government, were inclined to listen.

When I became president of ASIL, there was no doubt whose example I would seek to follow. I tried to emulate Tom’s wit—as when he reimagined the society 100 years hence as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Chinese Society of International Law. I sought to make an esoteric, technical field accessible and to cross political and legal (and not just disciplinary) divides, as he did. To this day, his is the fellow émigré’s voice I hear when I teach a class, comment on a colleague’s work, give students advice, or try to make someone understand what the law means and why it matters.

We all need someone like Tom to make us do our best and to teach us how to face life’s challenges with equanimity, courage, and poise. He died as he lived. In his last weeks he was engaged in planning for next semester’s U.N. class, assisting yet another government before the World Court, and giving talks on his latest tour de force (an article that uses proportionality to examine everything from trade to human rights). Just days before he passed away, he dragged himself from his sickbed to join in a tribute to his retiring colleague Andreas Lowenfeld. In a gesture that typifies his irrepressible efforts to bridge academe and politics, he used that occasion to remind us, movingly, of the as yet unfulfilled dreams of those who seek to use law to achieve a more just world. Looking at Harold Koh, the Obama administration’s nominee to be Secretary of State Clinton’s top lawyer, he asked whether it was “too late” to achieve that world. Koh responded by saying that it was not. It was to be Tom’s last message to those with power.—José Alvarez, Herbert and Rose Rubin Professor of International Law

Professor Franck was more than my boss for 44 years; he was a part of my family and my friend. Working with him was a joy and a learning experience.

I fondly remember being invited with my husband to accompany Tom to the University of British Columbia when he received his LL.D. So that we could see the beautiful city of Vancouver, where he grew up, Tom borrowed a friend’s car and spent two days showing us the sights. Sherwin and I also travelled to The Hague, where I spent two weeks working with Tom on his Chad v. Libya case before the International Court of Justice. The Hague is where Tom introduced us to Indonesian food. Wonderful memories!

Tom took tremendous pride in the achievements of his students. He was excited to hear when one was accepted to a clerkship, pursued an advanced degree, landed a prestigious job in government or a faculty appointment, or when one was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize. He felt the pride of a father. I admired most how Tom extended himself on behalf of his students. I will surely miss Tom, but I will always have a smile on my face when thinking of him.— Shelley Fenchel

In one of his last publications, Tom writes of the beginning of his career as a research assistant to the legendary international law professor Louis Sohn. Tom was struck by the collection of giraffes that Sohn kept in his office and home to remind him that it was possible to keep one’s head in the clouds while keeping one’s feet firmly planted on the ground. I think that also describes Tom perfectly.

We were friends, to some extent rivals, and on most issues, we thought alike. Interestingly enough, we differed several times on issues of U.S. constitutional law. To take just one instance, at the time that the U.S. government wanted to get out of the Mutual Defense Treaty with the Republic of China (Taiwan), Tom and I were both asked to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on whether it was the president or the Senate that had the authority to terminate a treaty. Tom argued that since the Senate had given its advice and consent to making a treaty, it had to give its advice and consent to unmaking or withdrawing from it. I said the president makes treaties, and so the president must be able to unmake them. Government lawyers faced with such a question too often look first to the answer desired, then develop an argument to support it. For Tom it was not only possible but fundamentally ethical to address the question without regard to how one felt about Taiwan or the Defense Treaty.

Tom Franck will be best remembered for his seminal work at the frontier of law and philosophy—explorations of legitimacy, fairness, impartiality, proportionality, and the use and abuse of force. But like the giraffe in his mentor’s study, he could plant his feet firmly on the ground as well.—Andreas Lowenfeld, Herbert and Rose Rubin Professor of International Law Emeritus

Tom Franck’s exceptional contributions to international law—as scholar, teacher, mentor, advocate, and judge—have been widely and justly recognized. Tom also deserves to be honored for his powerful influence on the NYU School of Law.

From the time I met him, soon after my appointment to the faculty, he was a key participant in the long process of transforming NYU from a good regional law school to the world-class institution it is today. He demanded quality in his own work, and he had high expectations for his colleagues. Thus, Tom was the obvious person to present the paper at the first faculty workshop, which younger members of the faculty instituted in the early 1960s. And, among many other activities, he served with distinction on the committee that formulated the plan for what became the Hauser Global Law School Program.

In short, Tom was for the Law School what in baseball is called an impact player—he brought luster to us all through intellect, character, and dedication. He cannot be replaced.—Norman Dorsen, Frederick I. and Grace A. Stokes Professor of Law

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Nixon’s trip, of course, not only marked the opening of U.S.-China relations, it also set China on a path to becoming a world economic power. And as China ascended, so did Cohen’s legal career; his specialty—Chinese legal studies—went from an obscure, backwater academic discipline to a high-profile, high-stakes area of expertise. By any standard, his career has been remarkably productive and influential: Through his 17 years at Harvard Law, where he founded the nation’s first East Asia legal studies program, his nearly two decades as a deal-making partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, and his most recent years at NYU Law, which he joined in 1990, Cohen, 79, has had a significant impact on legal affairs in East Asia, particularly in China.

As a human rights advocate, he has helped secure the release of several political prisoners in the region, such as Annette Lu, who would become a vice president of Taiwan, and Kim Dae-jung, who would serve as president of South Korea and win the Nobel Peace Prize. As an attorney practicing international business law, he achieved several firsts, including becoming the first Western lawyer to practice in Beijing under communist rule.

Known as the “Godfather” of Chinese legal studies because he was a pioneer in the field and a mentor to so many, Cohen has taught and inspired literally hundreds, many of them now leading scholars and policy makers, including William Alford, director of East Asian Legal Studies at Harvard, Ma Ying-jeou (LL.M. ’76), Taiwan’s president, and Clark Randt Jr., the recent U.S. ambassador to China, all of whom Cohen taught at Harvard.

[Sidebar: A Force in Taiwan]

As a result of NYU’s LL.M. program, which annually draws some 40 students from China and another dozen from Taiwan, as well as his frequent speaking and teaching engagements overseas, Cohen acolytes can be found in law firms, in law schools, and throughout the civil and criminal justice system in China and Taiwan, and he is a virtual celebrity in Chinese legal circles. “If you look at the field of China law—now an enormous community—it’s kind of shaped like a pyramid,” says Stephen Orlins, 59, a former Cohen student from Harvard and president of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. “People in their 20s are at the base. People like me are in the second rung near the top. And Jerry sits at the top. Jerry is the father of it all.”

A MASTER NEGOTIATOR

With his full moustache, propensity for bow ties, and friendly, can-do demeanor, Cohen has always stood out in China. But due to his ability to read people and connect, regardless of their age, social status, or nationality, he has managed to bridge the cultural divide and broker solutions.

Everyone who knows Cohen remarks upon his graciousness and generosity, his consistent willingness to make introductions or give advice to people in the field. “He is such a prince,” says Sharon Hom ’80, executive director of Human Rights in China, who recalls how Cohen spent hours vetting the organization’s draft report on China’s opaque state-secrets system. “Jerry always has time for people, not just famous people,” says Ira Belkin ’82, who runs the Ford Foundation’s Law and Rights program in China and still remembers attending an NYU Law event in Shanghai years ago and being impressed at how Cohen had a personal relationship with every student. Indeed, this knack for cultivating relationships, whether with Chinese bureaucrats, American politicians, human rights activists, or young law students, is a key factor in his influence.

Cohen always uses his relationship-building skills in service of his higher goal: pushing for a genuine rule of law in China. Cohen has consistently supported China’s international ambitions, advocating for normalization of relations in the 1970s, negotiating Chinese joint ventures for multinationals through the 1980s and 1990s, and pushing for China’s admission to the World Trade Organization in 2001, because he believes that through international contacts, contracts, and cooperation, China will gradually adopt and follow the rule of law. But Cohen also has been willing to point out when China falls short—and in recent years has adroitly used the media to put pressure on the government. Whether pointing out corruption in China’s international arbitration body, as he did in 2005, or campaigning day-in, day-out for the protection of Chinese defense lawyers from government harassment and imprisonment, Cohen has often named names, publicly challenging the responsible government officials to do the right thing.

Quite remarkably, Cohen manages to still be seen as a “friend of China,” free to speak, lecture, and travel in the country, even while he has become one of the most vocal critics of human rights abuses and corruption in China’s legal system. “I am walking a fine line,” says Cohen. “Some people there don’t appreciate my criticism. But I’ve got a long track record in China. People know that I’ve invested many years in improving relations with China.”

Many, such as Orlins, point to Cohen’s masterly way of framing his arguments to the Chinese. “He never lectures them on democracy or some Western concept,” says Orlins. “He points to their laws and talks about how they need to conform to them. There is a genius to what he does.” Chenguang Wang, former dean of China’s Tsinghua Law School who also has been a Global Visiting Professor at NYU Law, agrees, adding, “I am really fascinated with how Jerry communicates. He is so skillful and knows exactly how to get his point across.”

FROM NEW JERSEY TO BEIJING

Cohen’s ascent to China law scholar was not something anyone in his family would have predicted. He grew up in Linden, New Jersey, a middle-class suburb of Newark. His father, a Republican lawyer, had served as city attorney but was frustrated from higher office due to subsequent Democratic dominance during the Roosevelt years. His mother, hoping Jerry would go into politics, once suggested he drop his Jewish surname and run for office as “Jerome Alan.” But Cohen, always preternaturally confident, brushed off the idea. “Changing my name seemed counter to the best American traditions,” he says. “I also believed that ability was more important than background.”

And Cohen’s ability was obvious to all from a young age. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Yale in 1951 and spending a year studying international relations on a Fulbright Scholarship in France, he went to Yale Law School, where he served as editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal and graduated number one in his class. He then clerked at the Supreme Court—first for Chief Justice Earl Warren in 1955, then for Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter the following year. Frankfurter, with his willingness to speak out, became a role model; he also served as godfather to Cohen’s two eldest children, Peter, 52, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, real estate attorney, and Seth, 50, a New York City doctor. (Cohen’s youngest son, Ethan, 48, owns a New York City art gallery, the first in the U.S. to specialize in contemporary Chinese art.)

After stints as an associate at Covington & Burling, as an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, and as a consultant to the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Cohen had the résumé, smarts, and connections for the kind of political career that would have made his parents proud. But he chose to teach law at the University of California, Berkeley. “I always wanted to be able to speak freely, and academic tenure provided that,” he said.

A year later, in 1960, the Rockefeller Foundation’s president, Dean Rusk, who had been assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs during the Korean War, offered a four-year grant for a law professor at Berkeley to study China. Frank Newman, the incoming dean, asked Cohen to help find someone for the spot. Cohen spoke to several prospects but couldn’t persuade anybody to take up such an arcane discipline as Chinese legal studies. In the process of trying, though, Cohen says, he persuaded himself. “This was a chance to do something distinctive. I wanted to be a pioneer.”

His wife, Joan, who had a B.A. in art history from Smith College and was then an at-home mom of two (with a third son to be born in 1961), says she gave Cohen her blessing but told him, “You’re picking the one field where no firm would ever want to consult you.” Many of Cohen’s friends and colleagues “thought I must be having a nervous breakdown,” says Cohen, noting China was then completely closed off from the West. His old mentor Justice Frankfurter even wrote Cohen, warning him that he was “throwing away” all his hard-earned knowledge of U.S. law.

Cohen’s faith—in himself, his new vocation—was not shaken, and in fact, as was his nature, he seemed to gain strength in the face of opposition. After getting over Frankfurter’s barb, Cohen wrote him a note saying he understood Frankfurter’s reaction because the retiring Berkeley dean—whom Frankfurter disliked intensely—had told Cohen the same thing. Frankfurter, Cohen says, then dashed off a handwritten letter: “Given the role China is destined to play in your lifetime and that of your children, you tell him to go to hell!” It was vintage Cohen: With his good-natured sense of humor and astute insight into people, he’d gotten exactly the response he’d wanted—and proven a point.

So, just after his 30th birthday, Cohen began studying Mandarin in the basement of his Berkeley house. “It was August 15, 1960, 9:00 a.m.,” says Cohen, who has a razor-sharp memory for names, dates, and events. Joan, meanwhile, began taking a course in Chinese studies at Berkeley, which would lead to her own career as a photographer and an art historian specializing in modern Chinese art. (The couple would collaborate on China Today and Her Ancient Treasures, an illustrated book aimed at newcomers to Chinese culture. Chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club as an alternate selection, it was first published in 1974.)

By 1963, Cohen, near-fluent in Mandarin, was on sabbatical in Hong Kong, interviewing refugees from mainland China about legal procedures used in criminal cases. The result was his first book, The Criminal Process in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1963, widely praised for detailing criminal procedure in China and analyzing its connection to Confucian and imperial Chinese traditions and social norms and practices. In 1964, he joined Harvard Law School and moved to Cambridge.

Like many Asia scholars in the 1960s, Cohen lectured, gave interviews, and wrote articles opposing the reflexive anticommunism of the time. But unlike many of his fellow academics, Cohen also had a gift for negotiation and saw an opening to broker a solution to a notorious Cold War case that had been a sore point in U.S.-China relations. In 1952, a Yale classmate of Cohen’s, John Downey, along with another American, Richard Fecteau, had been captured and imprisoned by the Chinese government. China had insisted that Downey and Fecteau were CIA agents on a secret mission to foment rebellion in China. The U.S. denied the charge, claiming they were Army civilian employees whose flight went off course from South Korea. But Cohen remembered attending a CIA recruiting session at Yale in early 1951, where a CIA recruiter spoke vaguely of a possible mission in China. Cohen decided not to sign up, but it was known that a few students, including Downey, did.

[Sidebar: Feats in Two Koreas]

At a Yale reunion, Cohen’s classmates asked Cohen to work on Downey’s release from prison. In summer 1971, Cohen appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and wrote a New York Times op-ed, revealing what he knew about the Downey and Fecteau case and urging the U.S. government to come clean. (During that spring, he’d also floated this idea to Kissinger and Huang Hua, then China’s ambassador to Canada.) “I knew how much China resented the hypocrisy of the U.S.,” says Cohen. “I thought if I could get the U.S. to finally tell the truth, that would satisfy China and they’d release” Downey and Fecteau.

In December 1971, Fecteau was released. Downey was released in March 1973, six weeks after Nixon, for the first time, publicly admitted Downey’s CIA affiliation.

FINALLY, A VISIT TO THE MAINLAND

Although it is known that Kissinger discussed the Downey case during his secret talks with the Chinese during the summer of 1971, the extent of Cohen’s influence is unclear. Kissinger didn’t even acknowledge the existence of Cohen’s 1968 memorandum on China until the 1979 publication of his White House memoir. Even then, he downplayed the memo’s importance, suggesting that the China scholars didn’t understand all of the geopolitical subtleties.

But for Cohen, getting credit was never as important as getting access: What he most wanted then was to finally visit China and learn the inner workings of the legal system he’d been studying from afar. In May 1972, Cohen made his first visit to China, as part of a small delegation of the Federation of American Scientists. It was thrilling. “So few Americans were allowed to visit that Zhou Enlai personally approved each visa that year,” he says.

Cohen and a few others had a four-hour dinner with Zhou, in which they discussed the possibility of academic exchanges. But Cohen knew that legal exchanges wouldn’t be imminent. Upon his return, he wrote in an essay, “The first thing to learn about legal education in China is that there isn’t any.” Their constitution, he noted, was mostly “an unenforceable collection of political slogans and principles.” Bookstores had no legal section. There were no law professors to meet—since the Cultural Revolution, they’d been sent to work on farms or shuttered at home.

In part because of Watergate, the reconciliation process stalled. Cohen’s real adventures in China would not begin until Deng Xiaoping became China’s leader and President Jimmy Carter signaled his readiness to complete the process of normalization begun under Nixon. As usual, Cohen saw an opening and seized it, suggesting that Senator Ted Kennedy, a champion of normalization, go with him to China to meet Deng. But when they arrived in Beijing in late 1977, Deng was ill with the flu, and his aides told Cohen he didn’t want to set a precedent of meeting with individual U.S. senators. Cohen remembers Kennedy was upset and warned Cohen, “I will consider this trip a failure if I don’t meet Deng.”

Cohen swung into action. Knowing that he and Kennedy were under constant surveillance, Cohen shrewdly staged some conversations with Kennedy in his hotel suite in which Kennedy complained about the impact on U.S. and China negotiations if he, one of China’s true friends, did not get to meet with Deng. Then Cohen called home to Joan in Massachusetts. “I spoke—loud and slow—about all the years I’d invested in getting Senator Kennedy on the right side of China issues, and now Deng’s handlers were messing things up,” he says. The ploy worked; Deng had a 90-minute meeting with Senator Kennedy, his family, and Cohen. (On January 1, 1979, the U.S. and China officially established diplomatic relations.)

A NEW ERA OF U.S.-CHINA RELATIONS

While few China experts have met both Deng and Zhou, as Cohen has, what established Cohen as a China insider were the years he spent as a deal-making attorney in the country. “I don’t hang around with the Chinese leadership. They think I am not a person who is entirely reliable,” Cohen says, explaining he never tried to cultivate relationships with the top leaders, fearing it might hamstring his ability to speak freely.

When Cohen tells the story of how he became the first Western lawyer to practice in Beijing, he notes he happened to be in Hong Kong on a sabbatical in January 1979, with a sideline consulting at Coudert Brothers, a New York law firm trying to expand its presence in Asia. Deng had just announced a raft of economic and legal reforms that were opening China to foreign trade and investment, and Cohen’s phone began ringing off the hook from Fortune 500 companies interested in setting up joint ventures in China.

Some of these calls, however, came as a direct result of Cohen’s gift for building relationships. A former Chinese tutor of his at Harvard, for instance, put him in touch with Xiao Yang, who headed the Beijing Economic Commission. Xiao and Cohen worked out a deal: In exchange for teaching 30 of Xiao’s commerce officials basic contract and business law a few hours a week, Cohen would receive permission to live and practice in Beijing, something no Western lawyer had done since the People’s Republic of China was established in 1949.

Even Cohen’s first major client, General Motors, which wanted to open up a $1 billion heavy-truck manufacturing plant in China, came to him through an acquaintance he’d made. Bob Rothman, a GM attorney, had heard Cohen lecture at the University of Michigan while an undergraduate majoring in Chinese in the late 1960s. He then wrote Cohen for career advice. Cohen wrote back, advising him to apply to law school and sending him several publications to help Rothman with a paper he was writing about Chinese marriage law. Rothman never forgot it.

“I was so impressed that he’d bent over backwards for some kid he didn’t know,” says Rothman. Though the company never got further than a memorandum of understanding on that plant, GM retained Cohen as an adviser off and on for nearly a decade.

Living at the Beijing Hotel, Joan and Jerome found themselves under constant surveillance. Their office and home phones were tapped, their rooms bugged. Visitors to their hotel suite were often interrogated on the way in—and on the way out. The couple, however, made a decision not to be intimidated. “We knew that at any point, we could be asked to leave. We wouldn’t know why or when it might occur, so we just went on with our lives,” says Joan.

In 1981, with his leave at Harvard up, Cohen decided to resign from Harvard and join the New York firm Paul, Weiss. “I just couldn’t leave China,” Cohen recalls. “I felt this was an historic moment, and if I went back to Harvard, I’d have to ask my former students in practice what is really going on, instead of being the person leading the charge.” (Joan’s career, teaching and writing about contemporary Chinese art, was flourishing, too. She would later publish The New Chinese Painting 1949−1986, as well as other books.)

Spending much of the year in Hong Kong (with a small apartment in New York and a summer house in Cape Cod), Cohen devoted the next few years to making deals and matching wits with Chinese officials, many of them party functionaries with no legal experience. “At first, I would go to meetings and people would just stare at us, blank faced. They’d never seen a Westerner before. They didn’t know if they could trust us,” he says. He learned that it helped if he could explain his positions using “a few old ideological maxims,” such as Deng’s saying, “Speak truth to facts.” He also found that if he could “say that it was good for foreign investment, and say it with a straight face,” his suggestions would often be adopted. “Often these slogans were useful tools, especially when dealing with people who weren’t lawyers but were guided by [Communist Party] clichés,” he says.

A favorite Chinese negotiating tactic, Cohen says, would be to insist that they couldn’t agree to a clause because of a regulation, but if you asked for a copy, the Chinese would claim it was nei bu, an “internal document,” restricted and illegal to show to foreigners. “You wouldn’t know if the instructions required the result they were advocating, or if the document even existed,” Cohen says, adding he supported China’s entry into the WTO, knowing that that would lead China to agree to conform to international standards, including doing away with the use of “internal documents.”

AN ADVOCATE FOR THE RULE OF LAW

On June 4, 1989, China’s army crushed the student protest movement centered in Tiananmen Square, and deal-making ground to a halt. Paul, Weiss closed its Hong Kong office. Drawn to the NYU School of Law’s growing global emphasis, Cohen joined the faculty in 1990, while staying engaged at Paul, Weiss until his 2000 retirement.

At NYU Law, he worked to build up the school’s Asia legal studies program, recruiting Frank Upham, a former student and an expert in Japanese law, as well as bringing over numerous visiting scholars and professors from East Asia. One of Cohen’s signature courses became Legal Problems of Doing Business with China and East Asia; drawing on Cohen’s unique experiences, the course also has included his frontline view of how Chinese business disputes can turn ugly.

After China established capital markets in the early 1990s, the Chinese had more opportunities to accumulate wealth, but Cohen says the system of guanxi—“connections,” or the old boys’ network— often meant that local authorities would sometimes collude with, or against, Chinese business executives embroiled in disputes.

In the mid-1990s, an American investment firm brought Cohen in as a legal adviser after a Chinese executive involved in its joint venture was kidnapped and illegally detained by local authorities; Cohen says the officials were looking to prove corruption charges leveled by jealous ex-employees. Cohen met with local prosecutors and went over with them “line by line” China’s then-recently amended criminal procedure law, including the provision allowing the right to counsel. “The prosecutor looked at me and said, ‘Our job is to get corrupt people! We don’t have to pay any attention to this procedure!’” says Cohen, who then appealed to the national prosecutors’ office to investigate—to no avail.

The local authorities typically have the last word in such disputes. For despite Americans’ impression that China’s leadership rules from Beijing with an iron fist, Cohen says the provinces and local governmental institutions often function as quasi-independent “feudal baronies,” in part because of the system of local protectionism.

As a result of such cases, since 1999, Cohen has focused on reform of the criminal justice system—what he calls the “weakest link” in China’s legal system. Even when Chinese officials do follow the existing rules, police still are permitted by law to detain suspects without approval of an outside agency, and suspects have no right to silence. Vaguely worded criminal laws against “endangering state security” and “inciting subversion” enable the regime to impose harsh sentences whenever it desires. Amnesty International, in fact, calls China the world’s “top executioner,” estimating some 1,700 death penalty executions, though probably many more, each year. China classifies the exact number as a state secret.

Cohen began working as a legal adviser on several key human rights cases in China. One of them involved Yongyi Song, a Dickinson College librarian and China scholar researching the Cultural Revolution who was arrested by secret police in Beijing in August 2000 and held in prison on charges of “purchasing intelligence and exporting it to a foreign country.” (Song said he bought old newspapers, books, and Red Guard wall posters from the late 1960s.)

Working pro bono for Song’s wife and Dickinson College, Cohen arranged for a Chinese lawyer to represent Song. Then, he masterminded a public relations campaign, enlisting the support of Senator Arlen Specter, as well as launching a petition calling for Song’s release, which garnered 176 signatures from China scholars around the world. Less than a month after Cohen joined the case, Song was released in January 2001. “If you see Jerry, please tell him, ‘Thank you, again,’” says Song, now a research librarian at California State University in Los Angeles.

More recently, though, China has been less willing to bend. Since 2005, Cohen has crusaded for the release of Chen Guangcheng, a blind human rights defender placed under house arrest and then imprisoned after filing a lawsuit on behalf of thousands of Chinese women who underwent forced abortions and sterilizations. In 2003, Cohen met Chen, known as a “barefoot lawyer” because he is selftaught in the law and provides free legal counsel to peasants, and Cohen became an ardent champion of his work. After meeting Chen through Cohen, Chenguang Wang, Tsinghua Law School’s former dean, says he instituted a program for Tsinghua law students to spend their summers training other “barefoot lawyers” in rural communities in China.

But in 2005, Chen was placed under house arrest; the next year, he was tried and convicted of trumped-up charges—property destruction and “interfering with public order”—and sentenced to four years in prison. Cohen has been writing and speaking out about the case ever since, even in China.

At a 2007 legal conference in Beijing, he held up a Tshirt reading “Free the blind man, Chen Guangcheng” and spoke about the case. “I wanted to make the people at the conference feel guilty,” he explains. “There are criminal justice specialists in China who don’t know what’s going on in their own country.”

In fact, his views carry weight with the Chinese legal establishment. “Jerry is the guardian of the conscience of the intellectual,” says Henry Chen (LL.M. ’03), a partner at MWE China Law Offices in Shanghai, pointing to Cohen’s criticisms of the China International Economic and Trade Arbitration Commission (CIETAC), China’s powerful international commercial arbitration body. In a speech at a 2004 legal conference in Xiamen and a 2005 article for the Hong Kong–based Far Eastern Economic Review, Cohen—the first foreigner to advocate before CIETAC in 1985—called out the commission for corruption, citing specific instances, and he said he’d advise clients to stay away from the commission, even though he was one of only about 100 foreigners appointed as CIETAC arbitrators. Soon after, CIETAC adopted some of the reforms Cohen suggested, but Cohen learned he would not be reappointed to the body. (At a 2007 arbitration conference in New York, Cohen says, CIETAC’s new leader publicly vowed Cohen would be reappointed. “I am still waiting,” Cohen says.)

Such retribution has been rare, and if he is worried about losing the right to travel, teach, and speak in China, he isn’t showing it. The Law School’s U.S.-Asia Law Institute, established in 2006 by Cohen and Upham, continues to promote legal reform. With the help of senior research fellows Margaret Lewis ’03 and Daniel Ping Yu, as well as others, the institute has brought over Chinese judges, lawyers, prosecutors, and academics to study such hot-button issues as procedural safeguards in death penalty appeals. Writing a twice-monthly column for the Hong Kong–based South China Morning Post, Cohen also keeps the spotlight on legal abuses, such as the case of Gao Zhisheng, a missing Chinese human rights lawyer who was last seen in the custody of State Security agents in February.

Despite the recent spate of human rights abuses in China, Cohen has no thoughts of retiring and remains optimistic that China will create a genuine rule of law. “Seeing the changes I’ve seen in China over the last 40 years, I know that it is possible,” he says. “And what better use for my life? I’ve engaged in meaningful work, and I am having an impact.”

—Pamela Kruger is a New Jersey-based writer and editor.

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“Our explanation was very simple,” says the one-time physicist, who used computer simulation to explore the question. Each time the nuts bounce upward, more small spaces than large ones open up beneath them. Over time, the peanuts fall to the bottom because they have more places to go, pushing the Brazil nuts to the top. The team was besieged with media requests.

Few physicists get into the New York Times, and fewer still are women—only eight percent of all physics doctorates were earned by women when Strandburg received hers from Cornell University in 1984. She’d built a solid reputation with the Condensed Matter Theory Group at Chicago’s Argonne National Laboratory, publishing numerous scientific papers on phase transitions—points at which the type of ordering within a physical system changes—such as melting. So leaving the lofty world of physics in 1992 to start anew was a particularly gutsy move. But she realized the aspect of physics she relished most was analytical problem solving, and the problems that intrigued her most were social issues. Strandburg also loves a challenge—she’s a second-degree black belt in Seido Karate.

She entered law school at age 35. After earning her J.D. in 1995 from the University of Chicago Law School, she went to Jenner & Block, where she worked on patent and contract cases in which the underlying dispute involved technologies such as telephone billing systems and automobile diagnostic equipment. But in 2002 she switched gears again and moved into academia, teaching at DePaul University College of Law until leaving to join NYU Law.

“Kathy is universally loved and respected,” says DePaul law professor Roberta Kwall. “She’s intellectually curious. We have wonderful discussions about law, religion, and our daughters. She’s not just a one-dimensional thinker.”

Strandburg will teach intellectual property and law related to technology and innovation. “She is one of the best-appreciated legal scholars in the field of innovation research,” says economist Eric Von Hippel of MIT Sloan School of Management. Her article “Users as Innovators: Implications for Patent Doctrine” (University of Colorado Law Review, 2008) “is the first by any legal scholar that analyzes the significant implications of widespread user innovation for patent doctrine.”

In that piece, Strandburg challenges today’s predominant patent law doctrine, the seller innovator paradigm, which assumes that inventors are motivated by profit that can best be assured through patent protection. This paradigm, however, does not take into account that new products or processes are often invented by the users themselves, e.g., cyclists, snowboarders, and even research scientists, who benefit simply by using their own inventions. “So if people are inventing for reasons that don’t need a carrot,” says Strandburg, “then maybe we should have exceptions to the way patent law is enforced.”

In “Freedom of Association in a Networked World: First Amendment Regulation of Relational Surveillance” (Boston College Law Review, 2008), Strandburg explores privacy protections in our digital world. Current legal doctrines guard the content of phone or Internet communication but do little to prevent government from tracking our networks of contacts. At a time in which more and more people associate digitally, courts need to consider First Amendment freedom of association protections in regulating relational surveillance.

With co-authors Michael Madison and Brett Frischmann, Strandburg is also working on “Constructing Commons in the Cultural Environment,” which builds on “Users as Innovators” by proposing a theoretical approach to studying institutions for collaborative innovation, such as Wikipedia and open-source software. Says Strandburg, “My career in both law and physics is characterized by an interest in the way that large-scale, apparently coordinated phenomena emerge from the ground up—be it atoms, as in my studies on melting and quasicrystals; particles, as in the paper on Brazil nuts; or people, as in my studies of scientific collaboration.” Strandburg inherited her talent for science from her dad, Donald, 79, who taught physics at San Jose State University. She acquired her commitment to social issues from her mom, Patricia, 78, a one-time English teacher, who involved her three kids in volunteer activities like working at a summer camp for prisoners’ children. In law school, Strandburg helped to reunite a four-year- old girl from Honduras with her mother, a political refugee.

Both parents came from blue-collar families, but let Strandburg know she could be whatever she set her mind to—which changed daily in high school. “One day I wanted to do math, the next I’d be studying the classics,” she recalls. The only constant was science; she graduated with a B.S. in physics from Stanford in 1979.

A visiting professor in 2007-08, Strandburg cotaught the Colloquium on Innovation Policy. “She impressed everyone with her enthusiasm and commitment to intellectual life,” says her co-teacher, Rochelle Dreyfuss, Pauline Newman Professor of Law. “She brings a unique interdisciplinary perspective that adds to the way we think of intellectual property.”

The move to NYU brings her closer to her daughters from her former marriage, Danielle, 23, who lives in the city, and Ariana, 20, who is a student at Swarthmore College near Philadelphia. Once Strandburg settles into her new life in New York, she plans to throw her annual holiday party, to which she and her partner of 16 years, Wai-Kwong Kwok, an experimental scientist at Argonne, invite lawyer, scientist, and karate-enthusiast friends. They sing songs and munch on home-baked cookies and, of course, some mixed nuts.

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The word “ego” isn’t part of Goodman’s vocabulary. “He’s very unpompous, if you will, which is not an attribute that’s in great supply. He’s just interested in the scholarship,” says George Downs, professor of politics at NYU. “He’s more comfortable spreading the credit around,” says frequent co-author Derek Jinks of the University of Texas at Austin School of Law. “It isn’t about garnering attention for himself. He’s all about making the world better.”

A one-time debater and an interdisciplinary scholar who holds a Ph.D. in sociology as well as a J.D., both from Yale, Goodman specializes in human rights law as well as humanitarian law, and was director of the Human Rights Program at Harvard, beginning in 2006. “He’s had a lot of influence. His scholarship has informed a lot of brief-writing in court,” says Harvard colleague Jack Landman Goldsmith. The U.S. Supreme Court heavily relied on Goodman’s amicus brief in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld when it overturned the government’s system of military commissions in 2006.

He built bridges at Harvard between the law school and the John F. Kennedy School of Government, and intends to do the same at NYU, cross-listing his classes with the departments of sociology and political science.

“Ryan Goodman is a leader among an exciting new generation of scholars who combine cutting-edge social science Ph.D. work with deep expertise in international law,” says Benedict Kingsbury, Murry and Ida Becker Professor of Law. “His intellectual range makes him an exceptionally perceptive and constructive critic on the work of his academic colleagues, and a wonderful adviser to students.”

By all accounts, Goodman is a painstakingly careful and rigorous scholar who is attentive to prior interpretation and uses insights from sociology to frame the argument differently. “He takes his scholarship somewhere that you wouldn’t expect,” says Mindy Roseman, academic director of the human rights program at Harvard. One such example is “How to Influence States: Socialization and International Human Rights Law” (Duke Law Journal, 2004). Conventional wisdom in human rights scholarship postulates that countries are either coerced or persuaded to abide by particular human rights laws. Goodman and co-author Jinks, however, use existing sociological empirical studies to set forth a third reason—acculturation. That is, states tend to emulate their peers. “By identifying this mechanism of acculturation, we can better design human rights treaties to promote good practices,” says Goodman. He and Jinks are expanding this theme into a book, Socializing States: Promoting Human Rights through International Law.

Goodman’s passion for international law and human rights issues was born during his privileged upbringing in apartheid-era South Africa. When the Soweto uprising began in June 1976, he was just six years old. “We were pulled out of school, and I remember seeing tanks rolling down the street,” he says. He recalls that his family’s black gardener was routinely detained by the police, and that black families were separated. “We had people working in our home while their children were elsewhere. It shook me up,” he recalls. “It left an impression. I felt a sense of responsibility for correcting the imbalances of the world.”

In 1979, his dad, Basil, then an executive at General Electric, and his mom, Carol-Lee, a ceramicist, left much of their wealth behind to emigrate to the U.S. “They left out of a sense of justice,” he says. “They didn’t want their children [him and older sister Tanya] growing up with the negative and perverse influences of apartheid.”

They settled in Birmingham, Alabama, where, ironically, Goodman witnessed forms of racism “disturbingly reminiscent of South Africa,” he says. He rejected the Southern customs of ballroom dancing and debutante cotillions, but joined his high school’s debate team, ran track, and played soccer and football. With a debate scholarship to the University of Texas, he placed second in the national championship.

Graduating in 1993 with a B.A. in government and philosophy, as well as a growing interest in human rights, Goodman worked at a grassroots development organization in India. There he realized that he lacked the skills needed to effect social change, so he entered Yale, earning his J.D. in 1999 and his Ph.D. in 2001. Throughout his studies, he continued advocacy work in India as well as South Africa, and interned at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

Goodman had considered remaining single, fearing that “marriage would take time away from promoting human rights,” says Jinks. But then he met Melissa Bender, 36, an infectious-disease researcher. They married in 2006 and had Ella, now two years old.

The depth of the NYU Law faculty in Goodman’s area of expertise was a big draw. “Many places engage in superlatives,” he says. “But in terms of intellectual activity in international law, NYU is unbeatable.” He will jump right in alongside Philip Alston as cochair and faculty director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice.

Goodman is also looking forward to moving with his family to New York. “Ella feeds off the energy of the city, like we do.” His wife was born and raised in Manhattan. And an added perk: Goodman can attend meetings at the U.N., where they know not to underestimate the might—in Goodman’s case intellectual—of those who speak softly.

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Rarely coy, Epstein began by declaring that Wal-Mart could provide health coverage better than Massachusetts could. Then in a move Herzlinger called “Kissingeresque,” Epstein distanced himself from his teammate, who was presenting a distasteful argument, and reached across the aisle to her. “It took him about five minutes to realign three of the four debaters,” she says. Afterward, Epstein was “surrounded by people who may not have liked what he had to say but were dazzled by his brilliance.”

Epstein’s debating skills are legendary, as is almost everything about the man. It’s been said that taking notes in his class is like trying to fill a Dixie cup with water from Niagara Falls. “Richard speaks without breathing, and in perfect paragraphs,” says Samuel Issacharoff, Bonnie and Richard Reiss Professor of Constitutional Law. During the timed closing remarks in Boston, Epstein got in 35 percent more words than did his opponent (218 words per minute versus 161).

It seems he knows something about everything, and his reach extends beyond the academy to newspaper op-eds, podcasts, and even YouTube videos. He’s written and edited 22 books on diverse subjects. At the University of Chicago, he has taught 27 different courses—including Roman law—since 1972. Epstein, who has been an annual visiting professor at the NYU School of Law since 2005, plans to follow suit when he permanently joins the faculty in 2010. “Whatever they ask is what I teach,” Epstein says. “That’s always been my rule.”

He trains students to speak off-the-cuff—a practice that can fell even the ablest. He calls on a student closest to the aisle, then moves rapidly down the row, getting through half the class in an hour. “He’s intimidating at first, but he’s not trying to embarrass you,” says Michael Schachter ’10, who nearly blacked out once when Epstein worked his way toward him in Contracts.

Epstein can debate any topic with ease because his arguments have a common denominator: classical liberalism. “I’m working off a strong, central theorem,” he says. In a nutshell: He believes in individual freedom, but not unconstrained by the rights of others, and in limited government with an eye toward the common good.

In his best-known work, Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain (1985), which has been cited in four U.S. Supreme Court cases, he doesn’t come down against eminent domain per se, but argues that the government should be required to provide the same protections as any private entity in a property dispute. “He, more than any other scholar, has had an impact on reopening issues about property rights that have been neglected for decades in the constitutional literature,” says Vanderbilt law professor James Ely. Epstein is currently working on a book that analyzes the Constitution through libertarian eyes. The Tulsa Law Review, which traditionally honors constitutional scholars, dedicated its 2008 symposium to Epstein’s complete works.

Predictably, Epstein opposes most of the positions of his one-time colleague President Barack Obama. He does support the president’s call to safeguard habeas corpus rights and close Guantánamo Bay, while reserving his highest compliment for Obama’s skill in another arena altogether: the basketball court. “He’s a great player, but not the equal of Arne Duncan, his education secretary,” says Epstein, who played with those two plus First Brother-in-Law Craig Robinson at a party for Marty Nesbitt, Obama’s campaign treasurer.

Epstein was raised with his two sisters in what he calls “a perfectly conventional Brooklyn home.” His father, Bernard, was a radiologist, and his mother, Catherine, “a basic New Deal liberal,” ran Bernard’s office. Epstein did well in school, but was not a model student. He bounced out of his seat to blurt out answers, often lost his homework, and wasn’t a particularly good test-taker. “I had a bunch of teachers who prophesied an ugly end to my academic career,” he recalls. That didn’t stop him from getting into Columbia College. As a student during the height of the turbulent 1960s, Epstein stood apart from the protests. “I’ve always been a contrarian intellectual, and when I see lots of people out there chanting and screaming, my first reaction is that they’ve got to be wrong,” he says.

He graduated in 1964, earning a Kellett Fellowship to study at Oxford. The English curriculum was oriented toward private law, so he found himself immersed in work by judges with classical libertarian leanings. He received his B.A. in jurisprudence in 1966, then entered Yale Law School, earning his LL.B. in 1968.

During the next four years he taught law at the University of Southern California and met his wife, Eileen, a professional fundraiser. They have three children. At the University of Chicago, Epstein headed the John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics, and in 2001 served as interim dean when his predecessor left unexpectedly. “He filled the gap selflessly. People thought of him as a steady rock,” says Chicago colleague Douglas Baird.

In 2005, Epstein began splitting his year between Chicago and New York. “This is a faculty that is convivial and highly professional,” he says. “I like the culture.” His appointment allows him to keep his connection with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he has been a fellow since 2000, and spoil his granddaughter, Bella. In his leisure time he plays basketball and does crossword puzzles. With typical humility, he notes, “I have progressed from rank amateur to respectable mediocrity, and sometimes surprise myself by finishing a Saturday New York Times puzzle.”

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Ninety percent of everything he’s read since he started teaching is ensconced on his Tablet PC—a laptop with an interactive touch screen. “It’s a lot easier than remembering where I filed a sheet of paper,” he says. He uses two external hard drives, one off-site backup server, and a desktop computer fueling two hard drives that are mirror copies of each other. His system automatically backs up his work every three to four hours, creating four to five copies. “If you go paperless, you’ve got to have that mentality,” he says.

Beebe, 39, named Cardozo’s Best Professor in 2007, is beloved by his students, who see him as an eccentrically humorous intellectual with a well-coiffed plume of hair—“a theorist in a sea of practitioners,” says Cardozo alumnus Jacob Wentworth, who took three of Beebe’s courses. “He’s really interested in what he’s doing, and can really geek out about it,” adds Erin Simon ’09, who took his Intellectual Property and Globalization seminar last fall when Beebe was a visiting professor.

Beebe doesn’t like to cold-call on students, yet “he gets people to participate without putting them on the spot,” says Matthew Turk ’10. “It’s not easy to get the right dynamic in a 20-person seminar,” Turk adds, “but he struck the right balance between encouraging discussion and presenting information.”

Beebe’s work is known for its versatility. “Barton’s scholarship shows extraordinary range, from high theory to detailed empirical work that challenges some well-settled assumptions, particularly regarding fair use,” says intellectual property professor Jane Ginsburg of Columbia Law School. In “An Empirical Study of U.S. Copyright Fair Use Opinions, 1978-2005” (Pennsylvania Law Review, 2008), for example, he delved beyond headline cases, reading 306 opinions three times each to determine which factors actually drove judicial outcomes. “Coding the opinions took forever,” Beebe says. But colleagues say the results were worth the effort. “It’s the most refreshing and informative fair use article I’ve ever read,” says Pamela Samuelson of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. The conventional wisdom is that the commercial nature of a reputed fair user would undermine a fair use defense, she explains. “Beebe shows that isn’t so.”

In a completely different vein, Beebe’s forthcoming article “Intellectual Property Law and the Sumptuary Code” (Harvard Law Review, 2010) explores the use of intellectual property law to suppress the social and cultural implications of copying technology. Much of our consumer culture is based on the consumption of rarities such as diamonds, he says. But copying technology is becoming increasingly quick and cheap. “We can no longer rely on nature to enforce the conditions of rarity,” he explains, “so we’ve got to enforce those conditions ourselves, and we’re doing so through intellectual property law.”

Growing up, Beebe and his sister, Brooke, moved frequently to wherever their architect dad, Red, was needed to build a city’s transit system. Their mom, Nancy, now deceased, was a public school special education teacher. Beebe spent his middle school years in Houston, where football was the rage, and hated every minute of it. “When everyone was cheering for the football team and I couldn’t care less, I felt a real sense of estrangement,” says Beebe, who was a debater. “It wasn’t my world.”

The family moved to Oakland, California, during Beebe’s first year of high school, and life turned around. He fell in love with the city’s natural beauty and the intellectual atmosphere of his small private school. Despite taking some ribbing about his Lone Star twang, Beebe thrived, since debate was as cool there as football had been in Texas.

Beebe then went to the University of Chicago, soaking in the intellectual rigor of the school’s core curriculum, which focuses on the so-called “great books” of the Western canon. Graduating in 1992 with a B.A. in literature, he won a German scholarship, followed by a Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities while doing graduate work at Princeton University.

In 1998, he earned his Ph.D. in literature, but had become dismayed by the impact literary theory was having on the academy: “There was a lot of sophistry and theoretical jargon.” By comparison, he says, “law seemed so much more worldly, and I was attracted to the rigorous, pragmatic nature of legal thinking.” His debating skills made for a smooth transition to Yale Law School, and his literary studies naturally led him to copyright law. He earned his J.D. in 2001, and started teaching at Cardozo after a federal clerkship and a stint at Debevoise & Plimpton.

When Beebe visited the Law School, he liked what he saw. “It’s like a cruise ship,” bustling with activities, he says. “There’s something on Lido Deck 3 and something else in the Venetian Room on 4. You just can’t keep up.”

Beebe is married to Amrit Singh, an ACLU attorney. They live uptown with their rescue dog, Biba, bicycle together in Central Park, and travel twice a year to India—Tablet PC in hand. Says Beebe: “I can work in Central Park, along the Hudson, or in a garden in Delhi.”

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Yet he still took his colleagues by surprise when, while giving an address as president of the American Society of International Law in March 2007, he handed out a pamphlet called “International Law: 50 Ways It Harms Our Lives,” complete with items like No. 36: Failing to Prevent Genocide. “A number of people were affronted. A number of people loved it. But nobody forgot it,” recalls Lucy Reed, current president of ASIL.

Sitting at his kitchen table in Westchester, laughing heartily at his antic—the booklet was a parody of a more earnest one done by an ASIL committee the year before—Alvarez says: “International lawyers tend to be very certain of their moral virtue. We need to avoid hubris. It’s important to be aware of the pitfalls, the way international law can empower the powerful.”

Alvarez, 54, who writes extensively about public international law and foreign investment law, is moving downtown from Columbia Law School, where he was director of the Center on Global Legal Problems. He’s a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was an attorney adviser at the U.S. Department of State, where he assisted on arbitrations before the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal. “He cares about the difference international law makes for ordinary people,” says Mark Drumbl of Washington and Lee University School of Law. “He’s an extremely courageous scholar, a principled thinker who has inspired the younger generation”—including Drumbl, who is 40.

Alvarez insists that his goal is more than “just bomb-throwing.” As a Cuban immigrant, he says, “a certain part of me wants to welcome the outsider.” As ASIL president, he translated his newsletter columns into Spanish, and reached out to counterpart societies around the world. He takes pains to ensure that international law is accessible to all. He and Reed, for example, boiled down the basics of their field to a primer that Alvarez has used to introduce the field to practicing lawyers and even inmates at a New York maximum security prison.

In his best-known work, International Organizations as Law-makers (2005), Alvarez examines the growing role of international organizations in influencing state and individual behavior. The book analyzes organizations as disparate as the International Postal Union and the U.N. Security Council and is acclaimed for combining insight of the organizations’ day-to-day practice with theory and a dose of criticism. “This book is a treasure trove that shows how the law matters to people in politics, and how politics impinge upon the text that lawyers dream up,” says Thomas Weiss, director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. “Alvarez moves effortlessly between politics and the law.”

Alvarez is working on a book tentatively titled The Once and Future Foreign Investment Regime, which stems from a series of lectures he gave this past summer at The Hague Academy of International Law. The book will explore the nearly 3,000 bilateral and regional investment treaties that govern the rights of foreign investors and that, Alvarez argues, help drive economic globalization. “There’s a perception that the international investment regime is tilted in favor of rich, capital-exporting states and their investors,” he says. He will explore whether the regime needs significant reform.

In Cuba, Alvarez’s parents, José, now 94, and Maria, now deceased, worked side-byside at a popular tamale stand in their tiny town of Punta Brava. After fleeing Castro in 1961 with a hundred-dollar bill tucked into the elder José’s shoe and another $100 sewn into Maria’s purse strap, the family moved to the Bronx in 1962, and then Miami in 1966. As a preteen in Florida, Alvarez embarked on a lifelong mission to “catch up” to his peers: “I was driven to succeed.” He wrote for the high school newspaper, winning a prestigious journalism award. He took the few A.P. courses offered in his public school and entered Harvard in 1973. “I was this straight-laced Cuban kid” living in a co-ed residential house with upperclassmen. “Pot was flowing through the corridors; everyone was having sex, and their politics were to the left of Che Guevara,” he jokes.

Graduating in 1977 with a major in social studies, he won a Rotary Scholarship to Oxford, where he earned a second B.A. in jurisprudence. Returning to the U.S., he received his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1981 and practiced law at a D.C. firm and at the State Department. He joined the faculties of law at George Washington University and the University of Michigan before heading to Columbia in 1999.

As a visiting professor in 2008-09, he was drawn to the depth of NYU’s international law faculty and the preponderance of activities. “At NYU, I can walk in, turn on the lights, and everything is there,” he says. When his son Gabriel finishes high school next year, Alvarez and his wife, Susan, an appellate litigator, plan to move into the city to feed their passion for theater and film—particularly black comedies: “I’m inspired by people who force us to look at the world a bit askew.”

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Meron, Charles L. Denison Professor of Law Emeritus and Judicial Fellow, observed that as recently as 20 years ago, international criminal courts were virtually nonexistent. But in the early 1990s a series of horrific acts, particularly ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, brought the need for international criminal proceedings to the fore, and the ICTY was established. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda followed soon after, and the Special Court for Sierra Leone and the International Criminal Court (ICC) were formed in the ensuing decade.

These new international criminal courts have faced daunting obstacles, Meron said. Despite successful prosecutions, international judicial bodies are in a delicate position. “The tribunals are entirely dependent on the good will of nation-states,” Meron said, adding, “Recent successes cannot hide the fact that the tribunals remain extraordinarily dependent on actors outside their control to execute warrants, save for the few individuals who turn themselves in voluntarily.” Another problem is lack of participation in these institutions; 70 percent of the world’s population does not live in an ICC member state.

Despite these challenges, he said, international criminal tribunals have done much to define how international criminal justice looks in practice. “There is a world of difference between the rudimentary due-process norms of Nuremberg and the meticulous attention to due process in the tribunals…. It took the development of rules of procedure and evidence and the vital judicial gloss provided by the jurisprudence of the tribunals to create a credible, viable body of international criminal law capable of being applied by courts of law.”

The international criminal courts cannot do the judicial work alone, Meron said: “The tribunals, despite their precedent-setting importance, will never have sufficient material and political support to prosecute more than just a few of the many international crimes that take place. National courts will have to carry the burden of trying most international crimes.” Of the U.S. in particular, Meron was optimistic about its potential to prosecute international crimes, citing Barack Obama’s disavowal of torture and the decision to close Guantánamo. Even before the new administration took power, Meron said, the U.S. had been “doing a reasonable job of prosecuting rank-and-file members of its military who commit international crimes, though not in prosecuting higher-ranking individuals….I believe this record will improve.”

If the world has not reached the end of the path to justice, Meron concluded, at least it is on the right track: “In record time, international criminal justice has emerged as a key advancement in the long fight to end impunity, enforce accountability, and establish international rule of law. This is an achievement that humanity can be proud of.”

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Miller came to the conclusion that the crisis was foreseeable. He likens the current global recession to the Challenger disaster of 1986, in which the space shuttle exploded shortly after takeoff due to faulty seals on the booster engines. “The design flaw made what happened inevitable, but no one saw it at the time,” he said. “In this case, the challenge for law- and policy-makers who did not predict what would inevitably happen is how to take effective action to deal with the disaster and prevent further economic disasters in the future.”

In response to the overwhelming interest in the course, Miller made the unusual but welcome decision to open up the first three sessions to the Law School community. These three-hour classes in January each focused on a particular aspect of the crisis. The first class examined prior financial crises to gain historical background and appreciation for the scope of the disaster. The second, co-taught with Gerald Rosenfeld, co-director of the Mitchell Jacobson Leadership Program in Law and Business, looked at the “subprime mortgage mess” of 2007: how it happened, what could have prevented it, and its consequences on the global economy. The third class, also with Rosenfeld, looked into the credit crunch of 2008 and the “dramatic events that followed,” including the near-failure of Bear Stearns, the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, and the scramble for survival among large multinational companies like Citicorp, AIG, and General Motors.

After the first three open classes, the course became a seminar for the 28 registered students, who delved deeper into the course materials and conducted research and wrote papers on such topics as housing finance, banks, credit markets, insurance and securities, the effect of the crisis on Main Street, and the international dimensions of the crisis.

Miller said one of the biggest challenges in creating this course was compiling materials on what he called “a moving target.” Relying heavily on news accounts and government statistics, “I had to make it up out of whole cloth,” he said. The classes made extensive use of multimedia materials, including news items in audio and visual formats and hundreds of PowerPoint slides created by Miller. But the effort was worth it: “This is the most significant economic downturn since the Great Depression,” Miller said. “Fundamental damage has been done to the credit and securities markets. We face a very long recovery from the big bubble bursting. It is not going to be fast. We are all going to be living with this for a long time.”

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This class—designed for a group of student fellows who had spent the previous summer doing environmental law work for NGOs or government agencies—had been taught at the Law School for several years, but Wyman decided to give it a complete structural overhaul for Fall 2008. She contacted experts, most of them directly involved in the story documented in Scarlet Macaw, to see if they’d be willing to lecture to the class. “They were quite interested in coming to talk about their involvement,” Wyman said. She even managed to secure the participation of the author. Barcott talked with Wyman and her students via a conference call from Seattle. Nearly every class meeting was augmented with a guest lecturer, including representatives from the Inter-American Development Bank, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Conservation Strategy Fund, all of whom had a direct role in aiding or ending the dam construction at the heart of the book. Dr. Joel Cohen—a Rockefeller University professor who was not directly involved in the case but offered his expertise in population biology to the class—lauded his experience with the class, referring to the students as “wonderful.” “They were very engaged,” he said, “and asked smart, informed questions.”

Students, too, appreciated the experience. “I thought it actually worked very well,” said Maron Greenleaf ’10. Rather than focus on one theoretical topic, students were instead invited to see this one particular case from many different angles and to place their legal knowledge in a real-world context. “Using the one book provided a lot of coherence,” said Greenleaf. Wyman plans to repeat the class in the future—but with different books. She is, after all, inclined to innovation.

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