Gidon Gottlieb, Leo Spitz Professor Emeritus of International Law and Diplomacy, 1932 – 2015
Gidon Gottlieb, the Law School’s Leo Spitz Professor Emeritus of International Law and Diplomacy, died July 5 in Zürich, Switzerland, after a long illness. Prof. Gottlieb, who served on the Law School’s faculty between 1976 and 2003, taught courses in international law, jurisprudence, human rights, and negotiations. He introduced the course “The Lawyer as Negotiator” in 1985.
"When Gidon joined our faculty, he added an international perspective that had been lacking since the retirement some years earlier of Max Rheinstein,” said Interim Dean Geoffrey R. Stone, the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law. “In his teaching, writing, and collaboration with colleagues, Gidon brought to bear a sharp intellect, a deep curiosity, a wonderful sense of humor. His presence added immeasurably to our intellectual community."
Added Douglas G. Baird, the Harry A. Bigelow Distinguished Service Professor of Law and the Law School’s Dean between 1994 and 1999: “He was very much a man of the world, as illustrated by his standing instructions to the dean: ‘If you need to find me, all you must do is place an ad in the International Herald Tribune.’ ”
Prof. Gottlieb was born in Paris and was educated at the London School of Economics and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was a senior exhibitioner, before attending Harvard Law School, where he earned an SJD degree. During his doctoral studies, he taught in the Government Department of Dartmouth College.
After graduation, he joined the law firm of Shearman and Sterling, as well as the faculty of the New York University School of Law, where he directed the Peace Studies Program. He served as United Nations representative of Amnesty International from 1966 to 1972, as personal adviser to President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, and was a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. As a Distinguished Visiting Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Professor Gottlieb carried out an unofficial, pre-diplomatic Middle East peace initiative during the late 1990s under the auspices of former Secretary of State George P. Shultz.
“Gidon Gottlieb was always a cautious pessimist in matters of international affairs,” said Senior Lecturer Richard A. Epstein, the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Law and an Interim Dean between February and June 2001. “He could see that solutions were hard to come by in so many long-standing disputes but never gave up on the prospect that a long shot could come home. His 1989 article in Foreign Affairs about the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian dispute predicted in broad outline the erratic course of negotiations until today.”
Prof. Gottlieb is the author of The Logic of Choice: Concepts of Rule and Rationality, and Nation against State: Ethnic Conflicts and the Decline of Sovereignty, as well as numerous essays on international law, diplomacy, political theory, and jurisprudence.
He is survived by his wife, Antoinette Marie-Genevieve Rozoy Gottlieb.