Meron Medals

Last March the American Society of International Law (ASIL), an organization supporting the study and promotion of international law, honored Judge Theodor Meron, the Charles L. Denison Professor of Law Emeritus and Judicial Fellow at NYU, with its Manley O. Hudson Medal, given for “exceptional contributions to scholarship and achievement in international law.” Meron, the former president and a current appeals judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and an expert in international humanitarian law and international criminal law, served as a U.S. delegate to the Rome Conference on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court.

The society presented the medal at its centennial meeting, after Meron delivered an address that concluded that tribunals “have helped to instill the idea that justice, not retribution or impunity, should be the response to horrific crimes.” W. Michael Reisman, the Myres S. McDougal Professor of International Law at Yale Law School and chairman of the ASIL honors committee, lauded Meron “for his contributions as a teacher over many decades, as a creative scholar, especially in the field of humanitarian law, for his scholarship in the humanities, for his work for the U.S. government as counselor to the Department of State, for his leadership of the Former Yugoslav Tribunal over which he presided and for his contribution to the American Society of International Law, as editor-in-chief of the American Journal of International Law.” Meron, he said, would have qualified for the award for any one of these accomplishments.