In affectionate memory of Professor Myres McDougal: champion for an international law of human dignity.

• Author: Chen, Lung-chu
• Position: Testimonial to late Yale Law School Professor Myres McDougal

"Lung-chu, we have come a long way together." Those are the last words Mac said to me when I returned from Taiwan and visited with him last March, holding his hand at his bedside. Yes, Mac, we have come a long way together since 1960 when I first met you in Taiwan as a young law school graduate. For the past thirty-eight years, from Taiwan to the United States, to Yale, to New York Law School, and to all points in between, Professor Myres McDougal has been a great mentor, teacher, and counselor.

First and foremost, Mac has been a wonderful personal and family friend. When my wife Judy and I were married in 1967, Mac, together with Harold Lasswell, gave us a wedding reception at the New Haven Lawn Club and wished us, in his words, "an optimum shaping and sharing of affection and all other values in pursuit of both public and civic order." I am also proud to say that there is a McDougal in my family, Eleanor McDougal Chen, Mac's goddaughter, who takes pride in her middle name. In the good old days, it was customary for the Chens to pay the McDougals an annual visit during the Christmas holiday season, and those visits were among my family's happiest moments. Mac, Mrs. McDougal, and John were the most gracious of hosts. My family and I will miss Mac dearly.

I had the distinct privilege to be invited by Mac and Harold Lasswell to co-author the treatise on Human Rights and World Public Order.(1) As I had been their student and co-author with Harold of a previous book, Formosa, China, and the United Nations,(2) I was conversant with their policy science approach, otherwise known as the Yale School or New Haven School of International Law. Writing the human rights book with them has been a central part of my professional life. It was an experience that transformed me.

I would like to describe briefly the state of the art at the time we began the human rights project nearly three decades ago: how Myres McDougal conceived the project, his goals, the method he employed, and the impact it has had on subsequent scholarship and on the international protection of human rights.

When we began to survey the field at that time, we were struck by the inadequacies that were plainly apparent in the existing human rights literature. Mac characterized it as "simple intellectual confusion." The concept of human rights was often left obscure or simply taken for granted without any discussion at all. Little effort had been made to create a comprehensive map of the...