Walking Down Memory Lane on the 50th Anniversary of YJIL
The Scholar as Teacher
Professor Reisman's Scholarly Works in the Law Library Collection
"The knock on the door was followed by, “Come!” Lunch ensued in the faculty lounge. Michael had just invited me to co-write a paper on covert action based on a single comment I made in class. We continued “the discussion” at lunch, which meant that Michael and Myres McDougal continued the discussion. I grazed. I didn't understand a word they said. Were they speaking Latin? No. It was a legal dialect I came to refer to as “Ladougalman” -- a form of perfect prose derived from the scholarship of Professors Lasswell, McDougal, and Reisman, laced with phrases like “constitutive process,” “human dignity,” “modalities,” and “minimum and optimum world public order.”
What had I gotten myself into? After lunch, I called on Professor Eli Clark, whose reputation as the warm and kind undergraduate Master of Silliman College also characterized his open-door policy at the law school. I sat below the map Eli used as a pilot during” Operation Market Garden,” the Allies' bold, but ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to drop airborne troops to seize the lowland bridgeheads to the Rhine. Then, I reported my predicament. Did he have a dictionary that would define the foreign phrases I heard at lunch? He did not. I would have to devise my own. But he did have words of encouragement and told me to jump at the invitation....
... When I hit the ground, I found friendship, rigor, and an Everyman scholar dedicated to the study of force, minimization of suffering, and the advancement of human dignity and the law."
James E. Baker, Jupiter As Everyman: Michael Reisman and the Scholar As Teacher, 34 Yale J. Int'l L. 533, 534 (2009).
After receiving both his LL.M. and J.S.D. from Yale Law School, Professor Reisman joined the faculty at his alma mater, first as a Research Associate in 1965 and later as a full Professor in 1972. Here he continued to work closely with his mentors Harold D. Lasswell and Myres McDougal, developing the school of thought regarding international law which they had initiated at Yale. Reisman's close work with Lasswell and McDougal is evident through notes exchanged on each other's scholarship. His early work in the academy would provide the later framework for his active advocacy for their vision of international law.
Comments by Lasswell on Reisman's paper Accelerating Advisory Opinions: Critique and Proposal, 68 Am. J. Int'l L. 648 (1973).
The fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Communist bloc in Eastern Europe led to a new era of global politics and international law. In a 1992 book co-authored with James E. Baker, Professor Reisman explored the importance of this sea change in the particular area of espionage and covert action. The book highlighted the extra-legal nature of covert action, while also describing certain patterns and norms which had gained quasi-legal status internationally while theorizing how the end of the Cold War might affect these norms and practices. A contemporary review of the book in the Yale Weekly Bulletin & Calendar indicates the interest in such questions.
With Baker, James E. Regulating Covert Action: Practices, Contexts, and Policies of Covert Coercion Abroad in International and American Law. Yale University Press, 1992.
Clipping of article “Reconsidering covertness: U.S. needs to rethink its clandestine activities, says Reisman”, published in Yale Weekly Bulletin & Calendar, April 13-20. 1992
Through the Lens of Yale Daily News
Professor Reisman's activities on campus were frequently covered by the Yale Daily News. These stories included his work advocating for particular policies in international law and diplomacy, the many presentations he gave, and panels he sat on at the law school discussing issues of the day and the impact of international law upon them, and his constant presence and influence as a classroom teacher and educational mentor to hundreds of students, several of whom went on to become scholars and teachers themselves in the area of international law, foreign relations, and human rights.
No Death Sentence, Monday, Feb. 3, 1975, p.2
Panel Seeks Northern Irish Solution, Tuesday, Nov. 17, 1981, p.1
Yale Law spreads its vision of by educating professors, March 4, 1999, p.1-2
Selected Scholarly Works by Professor W. Michael Reisman
Professor Reisman's scholarship spans several decades, as can be seen on his CV. With work still forthcoming, Reisman has authored more than thirty books, more than ninety book chapters, forwards, and prefaces, and more than two hundred and fifty scholarly articles, newspaper articles, addresses, and other publications on a variety of international law topics.
Although Reisman's focus on the goals of a world order of human dignity has been his life-long dedication, as summarized by Siegfried Wiessner in an essay titled Law as a Means to a Public Order of Human Dignity: The Jurisprudence of Michael Reisman, 34 Yale J. Int'l L. 525 (2009), Professor Reisman has also written on humanitarian law, law and war, jurisdiction in international law, enforcement of international judgments and awards, international commercial and investment arbitration, maritime delimitation, and more. His far-reaching scholarly influence includes several publications in languages other than English, as well as his authoring the 258th volume of the Recueil des cours / Hague Academy of International Law, titled The Supervisory Jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice: International Arbitration and International Adjudication (1997), in which Reisman states that the international lawyer of the twenty-first century is a "world citizen".
Toward World Order and Human Dignity: Essays in Honor of Myres S. McDougal / edited by W. Michael Reisman, Burns Weston; introduction by Harold D. Lasswell; afterword by Eugene V. Rostow (New York: Free Press. 1976).
The Quest for World Order and Human Dignity in the Twenty-First Century: Constitutive Process and Individual Commitment: General Course on Public International Law / W. Michael Reisman (Hague Academy of International Law, 2013).
This is part of the Pocketbooks of the Hague Academy of International Law series, with the full text of the lecture published in September 2012 in Recueil des cours, Vol. 351 (2010).
The Quest for World Order for World Order and Human Dignity in the Twenty-First Century: Constitutive Process and Individual Commitment / W. Michael Reisman (2d ed. Leiden; Boston: Brill Nijhoff, 2022).
Power and Policy in Quest of Law: Essays in Honor of Eugene Victor Rostow / edited by Myres S. McDougal & W. Michael Reisman (Dordrecht; Boston: M. Nijhoff Publishers, 1985). In the Preface, Reisman and McDougal write "[f]or Eugene Rostow [former Yale Law School Dean] the study of law is, thus, much more than the training of apprentice practitioners in pre-existing rules and procedural gimmicks: it is the study of a body of knowledge, of 'the universal social science', of knowledge about how humankind has governed itself through the millenia and does, and must, govern itself in an expanding civilization of universalizing science and technology."
L'école de New Haven de droit international / W. Michael Reisman; présentation de Julien Cantegreil (Paris: Pedone, 2010). Reisman wrote in French about the principles of the New Haven School of International Law aiming to articulate a theory that establishes "the conscious, deliberate use of law as an instrument of political action".
国际法 : 领悟与构建 : W.迈克尔。赖斯曼论文集 = Understanding and Shaping International Law: Essays of W. Michael Reisman / written by W. Michael Reisman, Wan Exiang, Wang Guiguo, Feng Huajian zhu bian (Beijing Shi: Fa lü chu ban she, 2007). This publication, offering an evaluation of the international legal system and ways to improve it, is another example of Reisman's scholarly work breaking the language barriers.