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"A Legal Journey through the UN, Academia, and the ICJ: Conversations with Dame Rosalyn Higgins, DBE, JSD, FBA, QC" (2015) 15 Legal Information Management 86 - 94 

Dame Rosalyn Higgins

Dame Rosalyn Higgins’ journey to the most prestigious legal position in the world, President of the International Court of Justice, entailed a long apprenticeship on the workings of the United Nations, practice at the Bar, and an involvement at all levels of academia. This remarkable trajectory is a testament to a combination of dedicated effort, dogged adherence to espoused beliefs, and scholarly insights into the complex legal and political interactions that drove the UN’s making of international law in its early decades. We must also acknowledge her masterly constructive engagement with a wide range of colleagues and fellow jurists with whom she had to compose harmonious outcomes.

In this account I shall present a chronological biography of the life and career of Dame Rosalyn Higgins. A more lateral analysis of her achievements will be given elsewhere.

Early years (1939-56)

Rosalyn Cohen was born in Kelfied Gardens, North Kensington in 1937, and during the Phoney War of 1939 was evacuated with her mother and elder sister to the village of Wivelliscombe in Somerset. As recounted by several other Eminent Scholars in the Archive, the lack of enemy action during this period induced the authorities to recall the evacuees back to London, just in time for the start of The Blitz in 1940! This resulted in a second evacuation when Rosalyn and her sister were despatched to Aberdare in South Wales. Although only three years old, she clearly remembers a fear of being split from her sister, her mother having stayed behind to support her father who was engaged on air raid duties.

They returned to London before the end of the war, but Kelfield Gardens was rather close to Wormwood Scrubs, a large common ground with many ack ack guns that became the target for German raids. Consequently, the Cohen family experienced considerable bombing in their neighbourhood, including the V1s, and spent a good deal of time in their shelter at the bottom of the garden. Dame Rosalyn talked in a matter of fact way about having shrapnel in her neck - all the usual things that happened to kids in London in that age”, but says that she had no recollection of being hungry or deprived. By the end of the war she was still only eight. All her earliest memories were of WWII: it was a strict start to life.

Even at this stage one discerns threads that strongly influenced Dame Rosalyn throughout her later career, when she spoke of her parents’ influence on guiding ethics: “they were absolutely splendid people. He [Lewis Cohen] was straight as a die, wonderfully honest man with a strongly developed sense of ethics and what was right and what was wrong.” She was also fortunate in her schooling, which started during the War. Initially, she attended a local convent school, where the nuns were excellent teachers Her mother eventually had her transferred to the local “ordinary, lovely grammar school” - Burlington Grammar. She became a star pupil, at an establishment that had previously “never had anyone at university”. Three teachers stand out in her memory, but it was the History teacher, Miss Huston, who had a seminal influence on her life, and in all probability was responsible for starting the career of the first woman to be President of the ICJ. It was she who advised Dame Rosalyn to study law and subsequently to sit the Cambridge entrance exams. This was 1956.

Cambridge (1956-59) and Yale (1959-61)

Rosalyn Cohen spent three years at Girton College, where she fell under the influence of the “marvellous, eccentric” Majorie Hollond, the Bursar, a lecturer in Economics, who was married to the legal historian Harry Hollond. Although Dame Rosalyn found Harry Hollond almost as daunting as the exams, she “loved it [at Cambridge]....the whole four years I had there were wonderful....it opened all sorts of doors and wonders to me.” Prime amongst these benefits were the life-long friends that she made: inter alia Eli Lauterpacht and Robbie Jennings on the teaching staff, and Philip Allott, Andrew Jacovides, Hisashi Owada, and John McMahon (prematurely deceased) who were fellow students in the BA and LLB courses. Also through Eli Lauterpacht she met and formed a life-long friendship with Stephen Schwebel at this time. All these played major roles in her career in one way or another.

A further seminal event during this period was a 3-4 month stint that Dame Rosalyn did as a UK intern at the UN Office of Legal Affairs. This was in 1958, between her courses at Cambridge, and she told of how she beat a fellow student for the post - John Birch (from Corpus Christi). It was a source of satisfaction for her to record that this setback did not blight John’s career, as he later joined the Diplomatic Service and became, amongst other things, UK Ambassador to Hungary (1989-95). This short interlude provided Dame Rosalyn with at least three important things. It introduced her into the machinations of the United Nations; it showed her that in complex international situations there will always be several points of view that need to be considered, and it brought her to another of her life-long friends, Oscar Schachter, who was a US fellow worker in the Department of Legal Affairs. Although occupying only a short interlude, the internship was critical to Dame Rosalyn’s career.

After completion of her LLB, Dame Rosalyn returned to the USA to undertake research for her JSD. This saw the beginning of her association with one of her guiding lights, the “astoundingly charismatic, argumentative, strong personality” of Myres McDougal, Professor of Law at Yale, where she spent three stimulating years (1959-61). This was funded by a Harkness Fellowship [now called Commonwealth Fund Fellowship] and Rosalyn “fell under the spell of this extraordinary man”. The classes she attended were run along the case study, Socratic style and as she put it “ you had been given things to read for the upcoming class and then McDougal was absolutely ferocious in class. He didn’t mind humiliating and so we all sat there with our heads down so as not to be caught.” But it was effective, and it was a technique that she put to good use when her turn came to teach. As she put it “There is no point having passengers”. Over the years, Mrs Rosalyn Higgins (as she became in 1961) returned to the USA on several occasions, and the strong attachment she built then never faded: “I can say I have never been in the States without going to Yale.......I still feel very close to Yale. Obviously when Myres McDougal was alive I went always to see him.”

Two other golden rules which guided her career were inculcated during those impressionable years at Yale, and both informed Dame Rosalyn in the area of law where she first made her mark - the legal regime of the United Nations. One was applying McDougal’s adage of “think of the hat you are wearing” when dealing with any particular area of law, and the other was the “international law is not about rules.” The latter, came as a shock to her, an “astonishing fact which no-one had ever suggested [at] Cambridge.”

Life in the USA had been a revelation. Despite the fact that the War had been over for more than a decade “I remember being astonished at the fullness of the shops. I had never noticed the shops weren’t properly full [ in the UK] but when you went to the States and saw the supermarkets, that was astonishing....[while], the Harkness, the Commonwealth Fund, part of that was to provide you with a car to travel in the summer, so that was quite extraordinary. They provided me with this enormous Chevrolet, bigger than any car you ever see in England and off I set with three of those chums to go all around the States.... that was really special...”

LSE (1961-63)

Back in the UK, Mrs Rosalyn Higgins began the first of her three stints at the London School of Economics, that were to lead ultimately to her reaching senior levels in UK academia. During her first (1961-63) she wrote up her JSD, which was accepted by Yale in 1962. She later brought out the text as her first book “Development of International Law through the Political Organs of the United Nations”[1]. It was widely acclaimed, and as Dr Derek Bowett[2] pointed out , gave “the clearest possible proof that international law is being developed in the most significant way by the political organs of the United Nations”. Today, such a statement would appear self-evident, but barely a decade after the UN’s founding, the UN was considered a “tiresome newcomer to the scene whose activities are of little relevance to the substance of international law itself”[3]. Similarly, Oscar Schachter commented that “this pioneering study...made a major contribution to understanding the elusive “lawmaking” rôle of the political processes in the United Nations.”[4] Dr Higgins had showed for the first time the power and central role of the UN in creating international law, and she firmly established her contention, learned under Professor McDougal’s tutelage, that “international law is not about rules”. As Schachter put it “she face[d] squarely the contention that the views of governments expressed in UN debates and resolutions can have little legal significance .....[ because they are] adopted for political and self-serving interests...[RH concluded] that it matters not ....“it would be a curious form of puritanism which insisted that convenience and legality could never run side by side””[5]

This is a notion she adopted from McDougal while at Yale - “ he was the one who taught me, which I still believe to this day”, and has stoutly defended it throughout her career. During our interviews, Dame Rosalyn summarised it thus “There are rules .....in treaties, or .....in prior case law, or in custom..... but I think that there is a very, very limited number of rules. Rules are things that simply cannot be gainsaid, and there’s not much of that in international law.. .. The job of the international lawyer is to ....look at the facts of the present case and at the policy issues involved, and to find the preferred and better answer...”[6]. This book established Dr Higgins’ credentials as the authority on the UN as an international law maker, and on its mechanisms of operation.

Chatham House (1963-74)

On the back of this pioneering work, Dr Higgins was offered her first full-time appointment, at the prestigious Royal Institute of International Affairs (otherwise known as Chatham House) in London in 1963. Here she spent eleven fruitful years consolidating her reputation as the leading authority on UN matters in international law. It was an ideal climate in which to work, with writing tracts on “important” subjects one of the primary requirements of the staff fellows. Her role was “to assist in digging out answers for the corporate and individual members who would write in or phone, they wanted to understand” If it were “something about the UN expenses stuff and something like that, and then I’d be the one who would do the paper for the answer to be given”. “You were [also] meant to give occasional lectures, two or three times a year, in your area to all of those who chose to come in the wide membership.” At that time Chatham House “took pride in hardly accepting any government funds” and she was blessed with a Director of Studies who “was extremely encouraging in everything I did.”

During this time Dr Higgins “was able to get [her] head down and do the first two.... of [her] peacekeeping books.” These were the first two in the quartet of UN Peacekeeping: Documents and Commentary - Middle East and Asia[7]. These tomes were expressly designed to present comprehensive documentary evidence for the UN’s involvement in various operations, and to eschew any revisionist history. She had to examine huge volumes of material, with no help from assistants. It speaks for the thoroughness and comprehensive coverage that although in some ways now “they are very dated”, “everyone still working on peacekeeping in the UN Secretariat still has these”. Again, reviewers acclaimed the immense contribution Dame Rosalyn had made to an appreciation of the work of the UN, but she was modest enough to point out that “those years were nearer to the beginning of the UN than now...[and now] you just couldn’t do that without ten researchers”. Her reputation was further enhanced by two further books on international law written while at Chatham House: 1965, Conflict of Interests: International Law in a Divided World[8]; and 1966, The Administration of the United Kingdom Foreign Policy through the United Nations[9].

After eleven very productive years she left Chatham House, and Dame Rosalyn was very honest about her motivation. During her tenure “the Director was Kenneth Younger[10]..... he’d been a Labour Minister and was a wonderful internationalist....I flourished under him. Then came... Andrew Shonfield[11] who was of course very well known as a newspaper economist......and a very interesting and warm and outgoing man. [But] .....all his interests were at that time EEC interests and he wanted Chatham House to focus on all of that....so I knew it was time to go.”[12]

LSE (1974-78)

By her own admission, Dame Rosalyn’s return to LSE was merely “treading water while I tried to see what [was] next”. Despite this, the next four years (1974-78) introduced new elements which ultimately became important in her legal repertoire.

Firstly, having joined the International Relations Department, she began her lecturing career by teaching a compulsory international law course, which included a special presentation to non-law undergraduates. She described the latter as rather “noddy”, and a feature she rectified in later years. Dame Rosalyn also began, at the urging of her husband, to study for the Bar, despite “doing subjects [I] had long since forgotten, or never done and had no natural aptitude for....tax law and things like that.” The latter immediately proved very fruitful, and she immediately began to consult for Mobil Oil. This introduced her to the “heady” world of petroleum law and politics, as the North Sea was just taking off as a major producer. She described this period thus. “You had to have some skills in ....law but seeing how it could apply to something quite new, what could be built, what could be done, so it was exciting. Fortunately Mobil North Sea offices were literally at the back of LSE. It was so easy to pop out for an hour and when you weren’t teaching....So all of that worked very well and I became very friendly with Mobil’s North Sea Oil Legal Adviser, a man named Daniel Vock . He and I have been lifelong friends.....ever since.”[13] “Petroleum law was being made as it went along.” Her experience stood her in good stead, and she incorporated her expertise in later lecturing courses, and as examples that she used in presentations to international fora on the subject of the laws of mineral resources and states’ rights therein[14].

Finally, during her sabbatical to Yale in 1977, she taught a course on the European Convention on Human Rights. It was an example of Dame Rosalyn realising the opportunities offered by tackling a subject that at the time had a relatively short pedigree. She compared it with her work on the relatively young institution of the UN “I should use this opportunity in going to Yale to start becoming knowledgeable about the European Convention on Human Rights. You have to remember we are talking about a time where that had only been going for 15 to 17 years so you really could be on top of it.....[I had] already written an article in the British Yearbook.....before I went to Yale on the margin of appreciation in European Convention law. I thought I would build on that.”[15]

Professor Higgins: Kent (1978-81) & LSE (1981-95)

In 1978, the University of Kent offered Dr Higgins a chair in International Law. Her arrival coincided with the departure of Professor Bob Hepple, another of our Eminent Scholars, and they overlapped long enough to get to know each other. At that time, the law department at Kent was in “a sort of left-wing fervour, but Bob was one of the saner people. I really do think Kent’s pretty good now, they have come on a ton over the years.” It was during this period that the now Professor Higgins finished the two remaining volumes in her UN peacekeeping series: Africa and Europe[16]. It was also here that she became good friends with Professor Claire Palley[17]. They were later able to renew their friendship in Geneva where Dame Rosalyn served on the UN Human Rights Committee (1984 – 95) while Professor Palley was contemporaneously sitting on the UN Sub-Committee on Discrimination.

In 1981, Professor Ian Brownlie left his chair at the LSE[18], and it was offered to Professor Rosalyn Higgins. Thus begun her fourteen years as Professor of International Law in the Department of Law. When I asked her how she found the LSE, Dame Rosalyn was quick to defend its image: “People have said, “Oh, isn’t it all very Marxist.” It isn’t at all. There is every point of view and everyone very tolerant and everyone else.” She illustrated this by the “weekly debate [s] to which all the students could come” between Lord Desai[19] - and Professor Ken Minogue[20], “a very rightwing Thatcherite....They were great chums....It was wonderful”[21]. Here Professor Higgins thrived on a demanding round of teaching, research and administrative duties. She taught four masters courses: Human Rights; Natural Resources; International Law; and UN Law. The Human Rights course in particular gave her great pleasure, and brought her into contact with someone she greatly admired, the late Peter Duffy[22] from Queen Mary College. “Dear Peter...he was so outstandingly good....a wonderful academic...we did a joint course because, at that time before LSE declared UDI, all the Masters courses were university-wide.” The course on UN law, about which she was particularly knowledgeable, proved to be especially popular, as she explained “for years the UN had been in the doldrums. It was really only after Perestroika that it started to be interesting again and active again. So suddenly the numbers went from a handful to a really large group.”

Dame Rosalyn took her pastoral duties very seriously too, and “prided myself on trying to look after the students, even later when practice started to build up. I have had a contempt for those who do their practice and fit the students in. It absolutely has to be the way around.”

During her LSE years, three particular honours came Professor Higgins’ way.

  1. In 1984, she was invited to fill the vacancy left by the retirement of the UK member on the United Nations Committee on Human Rights[23]. This was a time-consuming appointment that took “nearly three months a year”, but she recalled the important work the Committee achieved at a time of great political changes. “It was an exciting time to be part of that committee....during the latter part the world began to change with Gorbachev[24] and Perestroika and all of that...... [Previously] there had been a very typical Russian USSR man and then he disappeared and one day Rein Mullerson[25], who is a wonderful man and a close friend who is now running the University at Tallinn, came along.. he was... Gorbachev’s Legal Adviser.
    When I asked Dame Rosalyn what the highlight of her time on the UN Committee had been she said “building the law....what we did on reservations, of which I think it’s generally known that I was the author, was apparently regarded as very controversial, I still think that was a good human rights move forward and pretty sound in law. You have to be slightly......on the margin of things in human rights law”.
  2. Professor Higgins stayed on this Committee until 1995, and for her contributions inter alia she was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire (1995).
  3. The third honour was an invitation to give the 1991 Hague Lectures - “they give you two or three years’ notice, but it is the general course, and you wonder what on earth can you say that all of these fantastic, distinguished people haven’t already said. So you read and read and read what everyone else has said and then you read around every topic. It’s a prodigious amount of work”.

ICJ: Judge (1995-2006) and President (2006-09)

In 1995 Professor Higgins resigned her chair at LSE to become a judge at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, where she made history by being the first woman to achieve this honour. She described the process of appointment, which is quite convoluted, and involves national groups, who nominate candidates. In the case of the UK, this consisted of a senior presiding judge (who was Lord Goff[26], the senior Law Lord), the last Legal Advisor but one (who was Sir Arthur Watts), and a leading academic. ”I was very thrilled when I got Robert Goff’s letter, but that doesn't get you to the court, that gets you nominated. Then the General Assembly of the UN and the Security Council vote on nominations. There are 15 seats at the Court and one third of them come up at any given time, so you are talking about a very small number of seats being available. Sometimes, of course, a judge will be standing again as sitting judge, and they really have a head-start in staying put. So I remember being out there for the election, that was very exciting, and it came through, the very good result. People were very kind.”[27]

I tried to define some of Dame Rosalyn Higgins’ characteristics during her time at the Court, and one which stood out was her own insistence on not doing just that. To this end, she insisted on being referred to at the Court as Judge Higgins, and eschewed her title of Dame - “I decided to break with precedent ......I said I just wanted to be Judge Higgins.....to line myself up with the rest of the bench. We do have these strange things in England that no-one abroad understands and I would say ninety-five percent of the British public doesn't understand.”[28] Also, in an earlier interview[29], Judge Higgins had referred to herself as a “liberal judge”, and I asked her to define this. She said “I think people generally are very conservative or very liberal by instinct. I think it has to be more than instinctively one way or the other, it has to be intellectualised within the framework of the law. I think my inclinations are to find things are possible if one can, rather than impossible and always to have in mind the people we are trying to benefit with what you are doing. I suppose that’s the best way I could answer.”[30]

As President, I asked Dame Rosalyn what she considered her main priorities were in maintaining a well-run Court. She gave me four[31], and I list these for the record. 1. “You obviously have to maintain the high calibre of the Court judgments. I don't think there has ever been a period where people have said, “Oh, this is sloppy stuff, isn’t it?” They have always been well regarded and it’s really important they should remain that way.” Then, 2. “You have to make sure that good drafting teams are chosen.”

She then elaborated on how the personality of the President came into play. 3. “You have to guide the discussions after the oral hearings. You draw up a list of what the key points are, people are invited to add to them....the Court members [then] go away and study their notes and the scripts and ....write what is called a judge’s note....[this] is essentially a draft judgment, but without full notes and all of that on these various points”. Finally, 4. “...you have to in a very fair way preside over the discussions on these... [so] at the end you have to be able to say,“Well, I think on this point we have got a majority, haven’t we, and on that point, let’s face it, we are so divided that if we don't need that point in the judgment let’s try and go another way.”

I also asked Dame Rosalyn if she could summarise her legacy after her Presidency. She cited three areas where she believed she had been able to improve the Court.

The first was to increase the volume of work that the Court’s handled. “It was a ....rather leisurely body when I arrived there.” “As the Cold War ended the Court became used more and more and we had to keep up with the pace and deliver to the client.” “I knew the Court needed to be modernised in terms of its work and to be able to do more than it did.”[32]

Secondly, Dame Rosalyn made a determined attempt to interact with the increasing number of new bodies being created. “other courts and tribunals had arrived on the scene. For years the International Court had been the only international body, but now, not only did we have other courts such as Strasbourg and Luxembourg, but right there in the Hague we had the Yugoslav Tribunal and the Rwanda Tribunal and very recently [created] International Criminal Court. We had to learn to have an efficient, friendly relationship with them.”[33] As an example, Dame Rosalyn cited her first official visit - “I took myself off to ITLOS[34] in Hamburg to pay them a visit. I think they were totally stunned. I tried always to do that sort of thing ......to build good relations between the courts.....I deliberately set out to do that and I think we did finish up with good relations all round.”[35]

Thirdly, “we had been through a period, I think, of standing on our high horse with the Dutch authorities and I wanted to rebuild good relations with the Netherlands.”[36]

Finally, I asked Dame Rosalyn what she considered was her most difficult case to judge. She chose the advisory opinion on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons[37], in which she delivered a dissenting opinion[38] (8th July 1996). “That of course was a real hot potato” She was referring primarily to the legal issues, but also to the fact that “the junior judge starts off in the discussion - so that’s fearfully daunting”, and for Judge Higgins, “it was...my second case” - so she was the junior judge. “So yes, that stays very much in my mind.”[39] The critical item (2E) in the judgment split the panel 7/7[40], and it was here that Judge Higgins added her dissenting opinion.

In retrospect, Dame Rosalyn made it clear that although she enjoyed her time at the ICJ, it was very challenging. Despite the inherent organisational and judicial vicissitudes of her Presidency, Judge Higgins managed to compile her impressive two volume work Themes and Theories[41]. This is an eclectic collection of her writings, lectures and presentations of various sorts, drawn together to illustrate themes that have engaged her energies over her career. Its sheer size is testament to an enormous amount of work, and I wondered how she had found time to undertake it, given her other duties. She explained: “The honest answer is I had one of the best decisions I made. [O]ne thing in which the newly elected President has a freedom is to choose his or her personal assistant, judicial personal assistant. I had had a very good intern – now the court has clerks but when I was there, they were interns – called Philippa Webb[42]. I sent her out a message saying, “I don't know where you are, Philippa”....“Is there any chance you can come and talk to me about some possible work to help me?” It turned out she was the Special Adviser to the prosecutor in the new International Criminal Court so she was just up the road. I don't know how I would have managed without her. She was so helpful administratively and in terms of legal research, everything, and she really made that book possible. Yes, she was absolutely terrific. I have always done my own writing, but in terms of getting the permission from journals for re-publications and all of those things she was super...”.

Apart from the legal content, the range over which the material extends is very wide, and is a fitting tribute to Dame Rosalyn’s breadth of interest and achievement in international law. In many ways, it can be seen as an expanded curriculum vitae, and any reader interested in gaining deeper insights into Dame Rosalyn’s views and interests, would be well-advised to dip into the 109 chapters in 1395 pages of text on a huge variety of topics. A truly monumental personal epitaph.

Retirement (2009-)

Retirement came in 2009, but Dame Rosalyn has kept very busy, although she has made a list of activities that she tries to avoid: trying not to give lectures, saying “no” to undertaking arbitration cases, not giving advice to governments, trying to avoid attending conferences. She has retained only “three institutional linkages: the American Society of International Law[43] of which I have just finished a couple of years as Honorary President; the British Institute of International Comparative Law[44] of which I am the President so that’s an ongoing rather more active thing; and the Institut de Droit International[45] on which, again, I have just finished up two years as Vice President. When I have a post I like to do something with it and I have tried to use those two years to have a modern, instead of an antiquated voting system within the Institut and I think we have achieved that.”[46]

Dame Rosalyn’s ongoing research project she showed me spread over her table in her flat - her “Oppenheim on United Nations Law”. She expects it is “going to take many, many years, a real practitioners’ book on the UN which Robbie [Jennings] and Arthur Watts[47] asked me if I would do.” It was such an impressive mound of material that I photographed it for the ESA. Even in retirement, Dame Rosalyn does not eschew hard work.

It was a great pleasure to interview Dame Rosalyn in her elegant Piccadilly flat. The location opposite Green Park is convenient for her husband Terrence, Lord Higgins, to attend the House of Lords, but it is clear that her time at the ICJ and The Hague, still have a strong attraction. [It] “was a very happy and fulfilling time for me.... There were some very good friends among my colleagues, each of whom was interesting. The issues that come up [were] always so fascinating.....working on that incredible site, [I felt] so privileged each day to be coming to work at the Peace Palace in the gardens with the pond and all the creatures on the pond....”. “ I love The Hague, which is why I still live there for a considerable part of each year.”[48]

 

Lesley Dingle - Acquisition and Creation of Content

Daniel Bates -  Visual Presentation, Technical Enhancement and Audio Editing


[1] 1963. Royal Institute of International Affairs, Oxford University Press, 402pp

[2] Later Whewell Professor of International Law. In Cambridge Law Journal [1964], p. 807

[3] Ibid.

[4] American Journal of International Law [1965], 59, p. 168.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Q138

[7] 1969, Vol. I, Middle East; 1971, Vol. II, Asia

[8] The Bodley Head, London 170pp.

[9] Maxwell school of citizenship and public affairs, Syracuse, 1966

[10] Sir Kenneth Gilmour Younger (1908-76), Labour politician and barrister in the Attlee government. Opposition spokesman under Hugh Gaitskell.

[11] Sir Andrew Shonfield (1917-81). Economist. Foreign editor The Financial Times (1950-8).

[12] Q48.

[13] Q51.

[14] For example the Wilson Government’s attempts to nationalise North Sea Oil in the 1970s. Used as an example in Dame Rosalyn’s Hague Lecture in 1991.

[15] Q60.

[16] Vol. III, Africa 1980: Vol. IV, Europe 1981.

[17] Claire Palley, OBE (1931-), Lecturer, UCT, Advocate in South Africa, Rhodesia & Nyasaland, Dean of Law, Queen’s University Belfast, Professor of Law Kent (1973-84), Principal St Anne’s College Oxford (1984-91).

[18] Sir Ian Brownlie CBE, QC, FBA (1932-2010), Professor of International Law LSE (1976 - 80), Chichele Professor of Public International Law Oxford (1980-99).

[19] Meghnad Jagdishchandra Desai, Baron Desai (1940-). Economist and UK Labour politician. Wrote Marxian Economic Theory (1973), Applied Econometrics (1976). Lecturer & Professor at LSE (1965-) http://www.parliament.uk/biographies/lords/lord-desai/2699

[20] Kenneth Robert Minogue (1930-2013). Australian political theorist. Professor of Economics LSE (from 1959).

[21] Q75.

[22] Peter Duffy, QC (1954 - 99). Human rights lawyer at Queen Mary College, London. Chairman, Amnesty International executive committee (1989-91).

[23] Sir Vincent Evans, (1915-2007). Member & Vice-Chairman UN Human Rights Committee (1977-84), Judge, European Court of Human Rights (1980-91)

[24] Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (1931- ) President of USSR (1990-91).

[25] Rein Müllerson, (1944- ), President of the Academy of Law, Tallinn University, Estonia. Professor of International Law, King's College, London (1994-2009), Member UN Human Rights Committee (1988-92), Visiting Centennial Professor, LSE (1992-94), Deputy Foreign Minister of Estonia (1991-92).

[26] Robert Lionel Archibald Goff, Baron Goff of Chieveley, (1926-). Co-author of Goff & Jones, The Law of Restitution. http://www.parliament.uk/biographies/lords/lord-goff-of-chieveley/2600

[27] Q97.

[28] Q93.

[29]December 22nd, 2011 in the Peace Palace Library, The Hague, with Otto Spijkers. http://www.peacepalacelibrary.nl/2011/12/interview-with-prof-rosalyn-higgins/

[30] Q98.

[31] Q105.

[32] Q104.

[33] Q104.

[34] https://www.itlos.org/

[35] Q108.

[36] Q104.

[37] http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/index.php?p1=3&p2=4&k=e1&p3=4&case=95 http://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/misc/57jnfq.htm

[38] http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/files/95/7525.pdf

[39] Q107.

[40] http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/index.php?sum=498&code=unan&p1=3&p2=4&case=95&k=e1&p3=5

[41] 2009. Themes and Theories: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Writings in International Law. Vols 1 & 2. 1421pp, OUP.

[42] Dr Philippa Webb, (?1979-) The Dickson Poon School of Law, Kings College London. Special Assistant & Legal Officer to Judge Rosalyn Higgins during her Presidency of ICJ (2006-2009), Judicial Clerk to Judges Higgins and Owada (2004-2005).

[43] http://www.asil.org/

[44] http://www.biicl.org/

[45] http://www.idi-iil.org/

[46] Q113.

[47] Sir Arthur Watts, (1931-2007), International lawyer, diplomat and arbitrator. Chief Legal Adviser FCO (1987-91). Whewell scholar.

[48] Q118.