Henry King, Nuremburg Prosecutor and Scholar of International Law

From Case Western Reserve Law School’s Michael Scharf:

It is with great sorrow that I pass along the news that our dear friend and colleague, Professor Henry T. King, Jr. died on Saturday, May 9, 2009, just a few weeks before his 90th birthday. 

For the past 30 years, Henry served as a Case Western Reserve University School of Law Professor and Chair of our Canada-United States Law Institute.  Right up to the end, he was energetically teaching, publishing, and organizing conferences.  (faculty bio: http://law.case.edu/faculty/faculty_detail.asp?adj=0&id=121)

 

Henry’s last televised speaking appearance was with me on a panel entitled “High Crimes, High Drama,” at the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage in Cleveland on December 10, 2008.

Henry was Case’s version of the Dalai Lama; our students flocked to his classes to soak up the wisdom gained over a truly extraordinary legal career.  At the age of 25, fresh out of Yale Law School (B.A. 1941, LL.B. 1943), Henry was hired as the youngest Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials.  At Nuremberg, Henry worked on the Justice and Ministries cases, led the prosecution of former Luftwaffe Field Marshall Erhard Milch, deputy head of the Luftwaffe under Hermann Goering, in the High Command trial. Henry interrogated many of the major Nuremberg defendants, including Albert Speer, who Henry later chronicled in a critically acclaimed book, The Two Worlds of Albert Speer: Reflections of a Nuremberg Prosecutor.

 

Upon returning to the United States, Henry served as director of the Agency for International Development during the Eisenhower Administration, and worked as a chief corporate international counsel for more than twenty years with TRW Inc., and later was of counsel at Squire, Sanders & Dempsey LLP.  He then joined the faculty of Case Western Reserve, where he taught International Business and International Arbitration, both favorites of our students that consistently had long wait lists.

Through the conferences he organized in the late 1980s as Chairman of the Canada-United States Law Institute, Henry played an integral role in facilitating the drafting and negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
 
In 1998, Henry and two other 80-something-year-old former Nuremberg prosecutors, Whitney Harris and Ben Ferencz, participated in the Rome diplomatic conference to create a permanent international criminal court and used their unique moral authority, dogged persistence, and skills of persuasion to convince the delegates to include the crime of aggression in the Court’s statute (pending agreement on a definition and trigger mechanism).   Last fall, in cooperation with the President of the ICC Assembly of States Parties, Henry co-chaired a conference and experts meeting on “The ICC and the Crime of Aggression” at Case Western Reserve, which developed proposals that significantly advanced the effort to define the crime and the conditions under which the Court could exercise its jurisdiction over it.      

Henry was an influential leader of the American Bar Association, serving in the 1950s as Chair of the International Law Section, and later as a member of the ABA’s special task force on war crimes in the former Yugoslavia. In addition he was the U.S. chairman of a joint working group, organized by the American, Canadian, and Mexican bar associations, on the settlement of international disputes.  Henry also founded the 200-member Greater Cleveland International Lawyers Group.

In 2004, Henry was appointed Canada’s Honorary Consul General for Cleveland and Northeast Ohio.  The Canadian Government, U.S. Department of Justice Office of Special Investigations, Robert H. Jackson Center, and Case Western Reserve University President Barbara Snyder, among others, paid tribute to Henry at a recent event honoring his 65 years of accomplishments and public service.

At a luncheon session that I attended a few months ago in which Henry reflected on insights gained over the years, he told the standing-room crowd of students that “the most important thing is to find some way to leave your mark for the betterment of society and the world.”  Henry left his mark in a big way.  His life’s work and dedication to international justice is an inspiration.  He will be missed terribly.