Rutgers Law Prof's Lifetime of Advocating for International Justice Inspires Book of Essays by Scholars, Activists, and Nobel Peace Prize Winner
Going after global problems takes guts. Bringing justice to global problems takes stamina.
Rutgers Board of Governors Professor Roger Clark has taken to task nuclear weapons, human rights violations, and other “great evils” for half a century. And he’s still fighting for rights the world over. With colleagues from the Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland, the United States, and the United Kingdom, the New Zealand born international rights scholar is litigating a group of cases before the world’s highest court in The Hague on behalf of Marshall Islands, where the United States detonated some 60 nuclear weapons and as Clark says, “left behind a big mess.” The cases, which are currently proceeding against the United Kingdom, India and Pakistan, contend that the nuclear-armed states are in breach of their obligations under international law to negotiate in good faith to rid the world of these weapons of mass destruction. The United States has declined to accept the Court’s jurisdiction over these issues.
What keeps Clark going could be the running he does most days, even at 75 years old; it might also be how he’s come to understand failure.
When advocating at the United Nations Trusteeship Council on behalf of the International League for Human Rights along with Roger Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, in part for an adequate cleanup of Marshall Islands, Clark at one point uttered despondently, “Looks like we’ve failed.” But Baldwin’s reply stuck: “No, failing would mean not trying.”
Clark’s lifetime of trying to make a difference in the Pacific Islands and in other small nations that he says “have no army so must use the law,” has just recently inspired a “festschrift” – an impressive tome of deep admiration from 41 scholars all eager to share how the Rutgers Law professor’s words and work have made an impact.
The title of the book, For The Sake of Present and Future Generations: Essays on International Law, Crime and Justice in Honour of Roger S. Clark (Brill/Niijhoff, July 2015), derives from the preamble of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The words “For the sake of Present and Future Generations” were negotiated in Rome by Clark and his former student Tuiloma Neroni Slade. Slade, Samoa’s first-ever law student, became Samoa’s ambassador to the United Nations and was later one of the first judges on the International Criminal Court. He is one of the contributors to the book.
The book’s frontispiece is a photograph of Clark and Baldwin at that 1977 meeting of the Trusteeship Council.
Its first essay is written by another former student José Ramos-Horta, president of East Timor from 2007 to 2012 and co-recipient of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize.
Ramos-Horta writes, “One of the best papers ever written by any scholar anywhere was [Clark’s] paper on ‘The Decolonization’ of East Timor and the United Nations Norms on Self-Determination and Aggression’, published in 1980 in Volume 7 of the Yale Journal of World Public Order. Over the years, I myself photocopied hundreds of copies of this brilliant essay and widely circulated it to UN diplomatic community. It was my main support document.”
The book also features contributions from Rutgers Law faculty Ari Afilalo, Pam Jenoff, and Beth Stephens. It also includes essays from his wife Amelia Boss (Rutgers Law ’75), a Drexel Law professor, and daughter Ashley Clark, who recently returned from East Timor as a Fulbright-Clinton Fellow.
“My dad was the one who introduced me to Timor-Leste,” says Ashley Clark. “Back then, I was barely four feet tall and Timor-Leste was firmly under Indonesian control. My dad was fighting for Timorese Independence when it looked like a lost cause. Even I, at the time, understood that bad things happened and sometimes you can’t change them, but you should at least fight. I think that was how I was introduced to Timor - my dad telling me that if you have the power, you must try to help the underdog.”
Clinical Professor of Law Pam Jenoff discusses two of Roger’s favorite works on diplomacy and the formation of international organizations written by Harold Nicolson: Peacemaking 1919 and The Congress of Vienna: A Study in Allied Unity. “Nicolson’s works are instructive to a scholar and leader in international law and diplomacy such as Roger not only for their historical content, but for the insight they provide into many of our present global challenges. Honoring Roger with this essay, I endeavored to give a brief overview of these two Nicolson books and the way in which Nicolson’s view in them was shaped and changed by his experiences.”
In her essay, Rutgers Law Professor Beth Stephens, the author of International Human Rights Litigation in US Courts, now in its second edition (Martinus Nijhoff) discusses the trajectory of human rights litigation in the United States, beginning with the first successful case in 1980, followed by several dozen cases against foreign government officials and corporations. In 2013, a Supreme Court decision sharply curtailed the lawsuits.
“I argue that this decision responded to a backlash against the litigation spearheaded by multinational corporations who resisted being held accountable in U.S. courts. I argue that the campaign to limit human rights litigation parallels similar, largely successful, efforts to limit the use of litigation to redress injuries to individuals harmed by corporate activities,” she says. “These limits have been imposed through a long list of legislative and judicial barriers that have made it more difficult for plaintiffs to file lawsuits and obtain remedies.”
Edited by Suzannah Linton, Gerry Simpson, and William A. Schabas, For the Sake of Present and Future Generations contains essays by scholars, diplomats, Judges of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, international civil servants, and activists on topics that range from the reform of the Security Council, to rule of law and international justice in Africa, to New Zealand’s cultural heritage, to customary international law in U.S. courts, and more.
This expansive scope of issues demonstrates Clark’s great reach in the fields of human rights and international criminal law. In fact, the Rutgers professor has been called one of the intellectual and moral fathers of the International Criminal Court. But to this moniker he shrugs. “I’m a teacher. That’s what I’ve done all my life. It’s been an exciting career and Rutgers has been a good place to do it for 43 years.”
A Haddonfield resident and graduate of Victoria University in New Zealand and Columbia Law School, Clark joined the Rutgers Law faculty in 1972. Since that time he’s been the first professor from Rutgers to present a case before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, arguing on behalf of Samoa to outlaw nuclear weapons; served as a member of the United Nations Committee on Crime Prevention and Control; authored more than 10 books, including Understanding International Criminal Law (LexisNexis, Newark. 3rd ed. 2013) and over 150 articles and book chapters; and served on the editorial boards of various publications, among other significant accomplishments.
On Friday, Oct. 30, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. a symposium will be held at Rutgers Law School to celebrate this publication and pay tribute to Clark. At a reception between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. a portrait of Prof. Clark by the artist Jane King will be presented and ultimately hung in the classroom he has long taught international law, criminal law, and several other courses.
The all-day symposium will welcome various contributors to the book as speakers, hailing from New Zealand, Canada, Germany, Liechtenstein, Hong Kong, and the United States, including local legal scholars from Rutgers, Drexel, Penn, Temple, and Villanova.
To attend the full-day symposium or the evening presentation, contact Carol Shaner at cshaner@camden.rutgers.edu.