McDougal as teacher, mentor, and friend.

• Author: Higgins, Rosalyn C.
• Position: Testimonial to late Yale Law School Professor Myres McDougal

Myres McDougal was an inspired teacher whose deeply original ideas have irrevocably altered the way we think about international law. No international lawyer of the last fifty years has been so much written about by others. His pugnacious style on matters legal was matched by Southern courtesy on matters personal. He was adored by his students and liked and respected even by those who profoundly disagreed with him.

Beyond any question at all, Myres McDougal has been the greatest teacher of international law in the postwar world. This is not to denigrate other fine teachers, of whom, happily, there are many. I, like most of us, developed under and benefited from several exceptional teachers, each with his or her particular skills.

But there is no denying that Mac was in a class of his own when it came to teaching. His revolutionary ideas, combined with the power of his oversize personality, left none of his students untouched. Today we speak of the "charisma" of certain leaders. But it is the wrong word to describe Mac, because the image is of someone whose deeply attractive personality moves an audience to follow where he leads. That was not at all the process with Mac. What we felt, rather, was that upon arrival at Yale we were simply blown down by a hurricane whose nature we did not yet comprehend, left for a period to dust ourselves down, and then invited to continue a journey together.

I came to Yale in 1959, after taking two degrees in law at Cambridge. For the first few weeks I was, quite simply, shell-shocked. I thought I knew a lot of international law and probably, for a student, I did. But I had no idea whatever about what it was all for, nor that legal judgments were not necessarily "givens," but could be intellectually challenged by scholars--and indeed even by students. The language of the McDougal-Lasswell policy science approach was, quite simply, incomprehensible. Sir Robert Jennings, my Cambridge teacher and later British Judge at the International Court, has reminded me on more than one occasion that I wrote to him asking how he could have let me choose Yale over Harvard as the place to pursue my studies. I had totally lost my bearings, because the inadequacy of what I came equipped with was being demonstrated to me in ruthless fashion, before I really understood what the proffered alternative was.

Mac's pedagogical technique, then, was to throw you in the deep end and, if you survived at all, to show you how to make...