International Law and Prospects for Justice

• Citation: Vol. 34 No. 4
• Publication year: 2020

International Law and Prospects for Justice

Rosalie Silberman Abella

DAVID J. BEDERMAN LECTURE INTERNATIONAL LAW AND PROSPECTS FOR JUSTICE

The Honorable Rosalie Silberman Abella^*

DEAN MARY ANNE BOBINSKI: Greetings and welcome. I'm Mary Anne Bobinski, Dean of the Emory University School of Law. I'm delighted to welcome everyone to this year's annual David J. Bederman Lecture. The late David J. Bederman was the K.H. Gyr Professor of Private and International Law. He was a world class scholar in International Law, who also served as an advocate on these topics before various courts including the Supreme Court of the United States.

And with that introduction, I'm already telling you a little bit how special this person was, to hold a named professorship at Emory Law School of course means that you are among the leaders in your field. But to combine that with advocacy in front of the courts and Professor Bederman's deep devotion to students, and the way in which he was such a warm and inspiring colleague to all those who had the pleasure of working with him, all those things in combination make him truly a rare and special individual who we are honored to be recognizing today with this lecture.

Unfortunately, with all those gifts in mind, Emory lost Professor Bederman in 2011 after his battle with cancer. Thereafter, the Law School received a generous gift that allows us to hold this annual lecture series, and very importantly, that allows students to have a fellowship at The Hague Academy of International Law. Again, those two things in combination, excellence in engagement with knowledge, with the intellectual pursuits of International Law and the real-life impact of that field all around the world that we see, and that deep engagement with students in making sure that students have the very best possible challenging experiences that will allow them to be inspired in the environments that they are in, and to go on and be inspirations in their own careers moving forward. This gift that allows us to have this lecture and support those students is truly a special way of recognizing Professor Bederman.

I'm also happy to recognize today David's family, his parents, Dr. and Mrs. Bederman, who are joining us here today, his wife Lorre Cuzze, who he met at

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The Hague I'm told, although I've not heard the story yet, who also joins us. His daughter is not able to be present due to other commitments.

And in addition to our distinguished speaker, Madame Justice Rosalie Abella who I'll be introducing in a moment, I'm also delighted to welcome Nadia Theodore, the Consul General of Canada for the Southeastern United States; Judge Dorothy Beasley, formerly of the Georgia Court of Appeals; Chief Judge Chris McFadden, Georgia Court of Appeals; Judge Amy Totenberg, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia; Mr. James Gerstenlauer, Chief Executive of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit; and of course the friends, alumnae, family, students and others who have come to hear today's speaker.

I'd also like to say a special word of thanks to Laurie Blank, who is the Director of the Emory Law Center for International and Comparative Law, and the International Humanitarian Law Clinic, and who is the organizer for this event, and who has been tireless in her efforts to insure that this lecture is available to us all, and that we have in particular our esteemed lecturer who I will now introduce.

It is my honor to introduce Madam Justice Rosalie Silberman Abella. I have to say just as a personal aside, that some of you may know that I was a dean of a law school in Canada for some period of time. It was one of the highlights of my time as dean to be able to go to the Supreme Court of Canada and to meet Justice [Abella] who I had heard so much about in every possible context you can imagine, from the excited engagement with what was important and true and real and an emerging thing that should be paid attention to in Canadian constitutional law, to people who've been touched by Justice Abella personally who felt their lives and careers and way of viewing the world had been changed as a consequence of that connection.

So, it was with some trepidation that I stood outside the door of Justice Abella's chambers, knowing that I was about to meet one of Canada's most illustrious jurists, who was recognized around the world for her work in human rights. And I was drawn into the office, and it was this intense, there was art, there was intellectual engagement. She started asking me about health law, which was my field of interest which I had managed not to think about in my time as dean for as much time as I should have, I realized, because she was asking very penetrating questions about the developments of bio-ethics in the law. It was truly an extremely important moment and one in which everything that I had heard about Justice Abella was reinforced just in those few moments that we had to spend together. So when I came to Emory and realized that I had

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the good fortune of being able to encounter Justice Abella again, I was amazed and delighted, and did everything I could not to take credit for Professor Blank's initiative, and yet to be drafted along, swept along in the excitement of the moment for our community.

It's also important as I shared my personal anecdote, to think about the way in which Justice Abella's life and career actually connect so deeply to the purposes of the Bederman Lecture, the reason for our being here today. It's hard really to imagine a speaker who could connect in any more deep or profound way with the things that we are recognizing today with David Bederman's life and life's work. To the idea of International Law as an avenue for justice and the protection of rights, to be together thinking about how deep study of international laws, values and norms are an essential aspect of our humanity and the society that we live in.

Justice Abella's life story reflects these very goals and values. She has received international recognition for her lifelong commitment to human rights and equality. Her life story mirrors the issues that we are talking about today. She was born in a displaced persons' camp in Stuttgart, Germany. Her family came to Canada, went to Canada as refugees in 1950. Among the many firsts that you'll hear me talk about in the next few moments, she's the first refugee appointed to the bench in Canada.

Justice Abella earned her Bachelor in Law degree from the University of Toronto, and she was appointed to the Ontario Family Court at the age of 29, the youngest person and first pregnant person to be appointed to the judiciary in Canada, two more firsts.

Justice Abella is well known, nationally and internationally, for the work that she did as the sole commissioner of the 1984 Royal Commission on Equality in Employment, where, as part of that work, she created the concepts of employment equity, and her view on equality and discrimination that she developed in that report were later adopted by the Supreme Court of Canada, and also by governments in Canada, New Zealand, Northern Ireland and South Africa.

She was appointed to the Ontario Court of Appeals in 1992, and to the Supreme Court of Canada in 2004, becoming the first Jewish woman to serve in that role. She has written over 90 articles and written or co-edited four books. It will be no surprise, given her distinguished career and impact nationally and globally, she holds 39 honorary degrees. It is my true pleasure and honor to introduce you to Justice Abella, this year's annual Bederman lecturer.

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JUSTICE ROSALIE SILBERMAN ABELLA: I don't think it's very polite for a dean to introduce a speaker and make her cry before she even opens her mouth. But thank you, Dean Bobinski. It is America's gain and Emory's gain that we have lost one of the best American gifts we got when you came to join UBC. Dean Bobinski was famous in Canada for being an extraordinary leader who inspired and encouraged and turned the UBC Law School into one of the finest in the world. So, she is here now at one of the finest universities in the world, and again, this law school and Dean Bobinski deserve each other. Thank you for that very generous introduction.

And how great is it to come here thanks to Laurie Blank's persistence and find that we have not only Laurie Blank in common, but Dean Bobinski in common, and now all of you, my new best friends. So, thank you for being here, Chief Justice McFadden and Judge Beasley. I know how busy you are, and I really appreciate the fact that you're here, and Consul General Theodore.

Mostly, though, it's just an honor to be here with the family of David Bederman, his parents and his wife. I read about Professor Bederman, and I must say I was just overwhelmed by the depth of his humanity and his scholarship. Usually you have people in an area like International Law who are experts in an aspect of it, because it's huge. He seems to have been an expert in about six different areas of law, and world renowned in every single one of them.

To be able to give a lecture in his name on International Law, the issue that he cared most about, to do it in the name of such a fine scholar and a mensch, from everything that I read, is something that makes me very, very proud.

As I prepared this, I thought, what would David Bederman have thought about International Law today? And I think he would have been worried. We are on the edge of a new future, one unlike any I've seen in my lifetime. It's a future that's very divisive, very insensitive, and at times very macho. That makes it very dangerous.

The moral climate...