Sir Hersch Lauterpacht – one of the most influential international lawyers of the twentieth century, and a judge, lecturer and writer – is commemorated with a blue plaque at 103 Walm Lane, Cricklewood, where he lived with his family for around 10 years. Among his many achievements, his work helped shape the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights.

Early life and education

Born on 16 August 1897 in Żółkiew, Eastern Galicia (now Zhovkva, Ukraine), Hersch Lauterpacht was the son of Aron, a timber merchant, and Deborah. Raised in a devout Jewish family with his elder brother and younger sister, he was educated at the local village school until the age of 13, when the family moved to the regional capital of Lemberg (now Lviv, Ukraine). After doing most of his military service at his father’s sawmill during the First World War, he went on to study and become involved in student activism at Lemberg’s university in 1916.

With his home town incorporated into Poland after the war, and amid resurgent Polish nationalism, Lauterpacht chose to continue his studies in Vienna after 1919. There he was taught by Hans Kelsen, an architect of Austria’s new constitution, and took his law degree in 1921. In 1922 he earned his doctorate in political science and was elected chairman of the World Union of Jewish Students.

In Vienna he met Rachel Steinberg (1900–89), who had grown up in Palestine; they married on 20 March 1923.

Life in London

Barely two weeks after their wedding the Lauterpachts left for London; he to study at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and she at the Royal College of Music. Hersch’s English improved at a remarkable pace and he was awarded a doctorate in law from the LSE in 1925; published as Private Law Sources and Analogies of International Law in 1927, it is now considered a seminal text of international law.

Lauterpacht was appointed to an assistant lectureship at LSE in 1925 and progressed to an LSE readership in 1935. The following year he was called to the bar at Gray’s Inn, taking silk in 1949, but it was as an academic lawyer that he made his mark – after 1937, as Whewell Professor of International Law at the University of Cambridge.

After residing in a string of addresses around London, the Lauterpachts settled at 103 Walm Lane, Cricklewood, by the summer of 1928. Here they stayed until they moved to Cambridge in 1938. It was at Walm Lane that their son Elihu (Eli) was born in 1928 and Hersch became a naturalised Briton in 1931. Eli recalled his father spending much time in his study at the back of the house, though he also remembered his parents dancing around the living room to the strains of Bizet’s Carmen.

The Nuremberg trials and An International Bill of Human Rights

Lauterpacht was a compelling lecturer and a prolific writer and editor. The central idea behind much of his work was that the sovereign right of nation states did not allow governments to treat their citizens in any way they wished, and that international law should offer protection for the human rights of individuals.

After the Second World War, Lauterpacht’s writings commended him to sit on the British War Crimes Executive. In this role he wrote a considerable amount of the opening and closing statements of Attorney-General Sir Hartley Shawcross, the lead British prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials of the captured Nazi leaders. It was Lauterpacht – who had lost all but one of his Poland-based relatives, including his parents and sister, to Nazi extermination policies – who recommended the use of the now-familiar terms ‘war crimes’ and ‘crimes against humanity’. He also made certain that the so-called Nuremberg defence – ‘I was only following orders’ – would not wash.

Acknowledging Lauterpacht’s key role in the trials, Shawcross wrote, ‘I hope you will always feel some satisfaction in having had this leading hand in something which may have a real influence on the future conduct of international relations.’^[1] Author and lawyer Philippe Sands describes Lauterpacht as ‘the finest international legal mind of the twentieth century and a father of the modern human rights movement’.^[2]

Lauterpacht’s An International Bill of Human Rights (1945) helped form the basis of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the United Nations Assembly in December 1948, as well as the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights in 1950. He went on to be appointed the British judge on the International Court of Justice at The Hague in 1954, and was knighted in 1956. He suffered a severe heart attack in 1959 and died in London on 8 May 1960, aged only 62.

1. P Sands, East-West Street: on the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity (London, 2016), 372.

2. Ibid, prologue.