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Law Blog Obituary: NYU?s Thomas Franck

By Chris Herring

Though international law expert Thomas M. Franck will be remembered for many things, one of the main takeaways from his NYT obituary — which ran on Saturday — is that the man worked hard. Very hard.

The former New York University professor, best known for advising foreign nations on law and helping a number of African countries write constitutions after breaking free from British control, died in his Manhattan residence last week of prostate cancer. He was 77. Click here for his NYU page.

Aside from aiding Sierra Leone, Tanzania (then Tangayika and Zanzibar) and Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) with their constitutions, Franck developed a reputation as a tireless worker who
spit out publications like a machine over the course of his career.

According to David Kennedy, an international-affairs professor at Brown University, Franck “published a book every 17.8 months for 43 years.” It wasn’t just books. Kennedy added that he also churned out articles at the clip of “6.34 publications a year — one every 8.2 weeks — for more than four decades.” In all, he wrote or co-wrote 31 books, among them “Nation Against Nation,” a 1985 book that highlights the shortcomings of the United Nations and "Recourse to Force," a 2002 book on how the UN's 1945 charter largely prohibited small nations from defending themselves during times of attack.

The Opinio Juris blog piece also boasts of Franck’s will to work hard. “Tom remained engaged to the end,” the post reads, adding that the scholar still attended meetings for cases he was working on up until the time of his death.

Franck (U. British Columbia, Harvard) spent 45 years at NYU as a professor, from 1957 until 2002. In that span, he won a pair of Guggenheim fellowships and served as president of the American Society of International Law from 1998 to 2000.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on June 01, 2009 (boomark / email).