Louis Henkin

Louis Henkin (November 11, 1917 – October 14, 2010) was an American legal scholar. He was considered one of the most influential contemporary scholars of international law and the foreign policy of the United States.

Biography He 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. Once he was accepted he was able to attend with the financial assistance of his sister and graduated with a Bachelor of Laws with the class of 1940. After graduating, he served as a law clerk to Judge Learned Hand of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

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. While with a 13-man artillery observation unit serving near Toulon, he was awarded the Silver Star for an incident in which he was able to use his ability to speak Yiddish as a means to negotiate the terms of the surrender of a German unit consisting of 78 men.

Beginning in 1948, Henkin worked at the United Nations bureau of the United States Department of State, where he was one of the individuals responsible for the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees in 1951, an agreement that established the internationally agreed upon definition of what constitutes a refugee and established the requirements for countries to provide asylum to individuals so designated. He 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. He 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. He was survived by his wife, Alice Hartman Henkin, as well as by three sons—his eldest, Joshua Henkin, is a novelist; his second son, David Henkin, is a professor of American history at the University of California, Berkeley; and his youngest son, Daniel Henkin, is the director of music at the Ramaz School—and five grandchildren.