Louis Henkin was considered one of the most influential contemporary scholars of international law and the foreign policy of the United States.
13 Facts About Louis Henkin
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Louis Henkin was a former president of the American Society of International Law and of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy and University Professor emeritus at Columbia Law School.
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Louis Henkin was until his death the chairman of the Center for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University.
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Louis Henkin was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
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Louis Henkin was born Eliezer Henkin on November 11,1917, in Smolyany, in present-day Belarus, the son of Rabbi Yosef Eliyahu Henkin, an authority in Jewish law.
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Louis Henkin's mother died when he was two years old while she was helping deal with a dysentery outbreak and he and his five siblings were raised by his stepmother.
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Louis Henkin earned his undergraduate in 1937 from Yeshiva College, where he majored in mathematics, by which time he had adopted "Louis" as his first name.
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Louis Henkin took a chance at applying to Harvard Law School after seeing a fellow student at Yeshiva fill out an application.
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Louis Henkin enlisted in the United States Army in June 1941 and saw action during World War II in the European Theater in Sicily, Italy, France and Germany.
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Louis Henkin left the State department in 1956 to teach for a year at Columbia University on the subject of nuclear disarmament which became the subject matter for his 1958 book Arms Control and Inspection in American Law.
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Louis Henkin taught at the University of Pennsylvania starting in 1958, continuing his work that was published as The Berlin Crisis and the United Nations in 1959 and the book Disarmament: The Lawyer's Interests, which was released in 1964.
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Louis Henkin was the Chief Reporter of the influential Restatement of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States.
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Louis Henkin died at age 92 on October 14,2010, at his home in Manhattan after a long illness with Alzheimer's disease.