The Hudson Medal is given for “outstanding contributions to scholarship and achievement in international law.” For many of us, Lori is the personification of the American Society of International Law. The essential elements of her biography are deceptively simple. She grew up in California, entered Yale College in the fall of 1970, in only the second year of coeducation there, where she majored in Russian and East European studies—streaking through the place in only three years and graduating summa cum laude. She received her JD three years later from Yale Law School and stayed in New Haven to clerk for Judge Jon O. Newman. She served as an attorney-adviser in the U.S. Department of State from September of 1977 through January of 1981 and then worked at Sullivan & Cromwell through 1984. She has been at Columbia Law School ever since.
These essentials fail to describe the Renaissance Woman before you. She is that rare individual who manages, at a time of specialization, to be a true generalist in public international law, who is also a worthy successor to her Columbia mentors. Like Louis Henkin, she is the leading scholar of her generation in U.S. foreign relations law. My students know her as the co-author of the leading casebook in international law—the “Columbia book,” formerly co-edited with Henkin and Oscar Schachter—but they probably do not know of six books and more in the making, ninety-five articles, book chapters, reviews, and published lectures, or that she speaks or is able to work in some five languages, and that she is a member of the Institut de Droit International. She has lectured virtually everywhere—the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg, the Seoul and Xiamen Academies of International law, the European University Institute, the Constitutional Court of Georgia, Qatar University, among other venues where the invisible college gathers.
Even some of those who are in this room may not be aware that Lori holds the international law equivalent of the sports world's GAAT (“greatest athlete of all time”) award, or if you prefer, the arts’ EGOT (a holder of an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony). Lori is the only person I know who has ASIL's GAAT or EGOT. She outshines all prior Hudson Medal winners as the only person who has been awarded the Deák Prize (for best article in the American Journal of International Law written by a young author) and ASIL's certificate of merit for creative scholarship, and has been elected co-editor in chief of AJIL and ASIL's president.
[The conversational write-up that follows has questions from José Alvarez in italics and answers by Lori Damrosch in regular font.]
Where does the story begin? What was your earliest encouragement in the direction of international law?
