Jonathan I. Charney - mourning and celebration.

AuthorHenkin, Louis
PositionInternational law teacher

It has become the practice to celebrate a life, rather than to mourn its end. The Charney family, and Vanderbilt Law School, did well to separate mourning from celebration. But I am not yet wholly ready for celebration. I mourn.

I knew Jon since before he was born; his parents were my oldest friends. I continue to be his mother's old, perhaps oldest, friend. Later, long ago, Jonny and I became friends and remained warm friends to the end. I have watched the family grow, with Sharon, and the next generation.

I mourn with them all.

The program for today lists, as scheduled to be present, Jon's family and special guests, and today we are seated as "Family and Friends." I am here as both family and friend, but also as a colleague and special guest.

Here, today, I wish to speak with you about Jon Charney, his good life, and his remarkable achievements. On this occasion I am pleased to add that I knew Jon Charney "professionally" before he began on the road to eminence. I was "present at the creation," as Jon Charney took his first steps toward becoming a world authority on the international Law of the Sea, and an eminent, prominent, lawyer and scholar in international law generally.

Jonny was still a law student when he spent a summer as my research assistant, when both of us learned that there was an international Law of the Sea. We pooled our ignorance, but Jonny went on to become one of the very few scholars, practitioners, advocates, public servants on that subject in the United States--and beyond. And he did it largely from that less-than-obvious "sea-port"--Tennessee. (Perhaps, like some others, he began with a New Yorker's view of the map of the United States and of the world.) Surely, Jon Charney put the Vanderbilt Law School, and Nashville, Tennessee, at the forefront of U.S. commitment, expertise, and contribution to the growth and development of the international law and of U.S. policy on the sea.

Jon Charney left the rest of us behind, in expertise, prominence and eminence in Law of the Sea scholarship. (For several years he was--among much else--Chairman of the Senior Advisory Committee of the Marine Policy Program at Woods Hole.) Then, Jonny's eminence spread from the international Law of the Sea to the whole of international law. He rose high in the councils of the American Society of International Law. He was a highly successful co-Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of International Law, the principal publication in...

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