Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Foreword: the transnationalism of Detlev Vagts
- List of cases cited
- List of abbreviations and acronyms
- Introduction: a Festschrift to celebrate Detlev Vagts' contributions to transnational law
- 1 Detlev Vagts and the Harvard Law School
- 2 Constructing and developing transnational law: the contribution of Detlev Vagts
- I International law in general
- II Transnational economic law
- III Transnational lawyering and dispute resolution
- Bibliography of Detlev Vagts
- Index
Foreword: the transnationalism of Detlev Vagts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 November 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Foreword: the transnationalism of Detlev Vagts
- List of cases cited
- List of abbreviations and acronyms
- Introduction: a Festschrift to celebrate Detlev Vagts' contributions to transnational law
- 1 Detlev Vagts and the Harvard Law School
- 2 Constructing and developing transnational law: the contribution of Detlev Vagts
- I International law in general
- II Transnational economic law
- III Transnational lawyering and dispute resolution
- Bibliography of Detlev Vagts
- Index
Summary
Before meeting in person, scholars often meet in print. And so it was that, more than three decades ago, I met Detlev Vagts, Harvard's Bemis Professor of International Law, in the pages of Transnational Legal Problems, a book we later came to co-author. I had seen him from a distance long before, when I was a Harvard law student. Although I never took his class, I often saw him sitting in his office deep in the stacks of the Langdell Library, usually with his door open, absorbed in a book he had pulled from the shelves. Someone told me that he was the son of a German scholar who had fled Nazi Germany. I heard from another that he was a man of great moral fiber, who would occasionally preach at Harvard's Memorial Church or speak with passion at contentious faculty meetings.
But I did not come to know Vagts' mind until I had graduated from law school, and started teaching International Business Transactions at night as an instructor at George Washington University Law School. As a young international lawyer in Washington in the 1980s, one day I found myself spending my whole day with Vagts the scholar: conducting research during the day as a Justice Department lawyer leafing through the American Journal of International Law (AJIL), for which he wrote and later served as Co-Editor-in-Chief; ducking out of work at lunchtime to attend a public session of the American Law Institute regarding the Restatement (Third) of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States, of which Vagts was Associate Reporter; then teaching at night from the 2nd edition of Transnational Legal Problems by Steiner and Vagts.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Making Transnational Law Work in the Global EconomyEssays in Honour of Detlev Vagts, pp. xv - xviiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010