Thomas M. Franck
Murry and Ida Becker Professor of Law Emeritus
New York University
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
4:00 p.m.
Falconer Hall, Solarium
84 Queen's Park
"The Inexplicable Effectiveness of the Concept of Proportionality in International Law"
The notion of proportionality is foundational to all legal systems and underpins cultural and ethical thinking about retribution, punishment and justice. In international law it provides the basis for determining what countermeasures a state may take against an aggressor.
Given its importance, it is surprising that the idea of proportionality is so little defined in legal and moral theory, even as it is so often invoked in practice.
In international law, too, proportionality is a well-known legal concept applicable to international criminal law, the law of war, the law in war, trade law, human rights law and international administrative law. In each of these fields, it seeks to clarify the line between permissible in impermissible countermeasures. In a relatively primitive legal system, reliance on countermeasures is often the best, or even the only, foundation of the legal order.
Professor Franck's lecture will explore this paradox of a legal notion that is, at once, both powerful and ill-defined. He will explore the unusual role and responsibility of those charged with rendering "second opinions" in the space created by that paradox.
A leader in the field of international law, Thomas M. Franck joined the New York University School of Law faculty in 1960. Franck, now the Murry and Ida Becker Professor of Law Emeritus, has been the Director of the Center for International Studies from 1965-2002. In addition, he has taught in a visiting capacity at Stanford Law School, University of East Africa, York University, University of Toronto, Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, Hague Academy of International Law, Cambridge University, Hastings College of the Law, Georgetown University Law Center and American University Washington College of Law. From 1973 to 1979, he also served as Director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's International Law Program, and from 1980 to1982, as Director of Research at the United Nations Institute for Training and Research. Professor Franck's interest in public international law is practical as well as theoretical. Indeed, he has acted as legal adviser or counsel to many foreign governments, including Tanganyika, Kenya, Zanzibar, Mauritius, Solomon Islands, El Salvador, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Chad. As an advocate before the International Court of Justice, he has successfully represented Chad and Bosnia in a suit brought against Serbia under the Genocide Convention. He has served as a judge ad hoc (Indonesia/Malaysia) before the World Court from 2001 to 2002. He was a member of the Tribunal constituted under the Law of the Sea Treaty to hear the boundary dispute between Guyana and Suriname. And, from 1986 to the present, he serves on the Department of State Advisory Committee on International Law. Professor Franck is past President of the American Society of International Law (1998-2000) and served as editor-in-chief of The American Journal of International Law from 1984 to 1993. Today, Franck lends his services to numerous organizations ranging from the American Branch of the International Law Association to the American Society of International Law.
The author of more than thirty books and a two-time Guggenheim Fellowship winner, Franck received the Christopher Medal for Resignation in Protest, the Hudson Medal of the American Society of International Law and the Read Medal of the Canadian Council of International Law. The American Society of International Law has awarded him a Certificate of Merit for four of his books: United States Foreign Relations Law: Documents and Sources; Nation Against Nation: What Happened to the U.N. Dream and What the U.S. Can Do About It; Political Questions/Judicial Answers: Does the Rule of Law Apply to Foreign Affairs?; and Fairness in International Law and Institutions. He holds honorary degrees from the University of British Columbia, the Monterey Institute of International Studies and Glasgow University.
