Articles

• Rensmann, Thilo

Abstract

As a tribute to Bruno Simma on the occasion of his 70th birthday this article follows the traces of two of his fellow alumni from Munich University who belonged to the first generation of ‘<it>droit-de-l’hommistes</it>’. In the early 1940s they laid the foundations for the entrenchment of human rights in the international legal order. Ernst Rabel and Karl Loewenstein, who taught in Munich during the inter-war period, each played a significant role in breaking the mould of isolationism prevalent in German legal scholarship at the time. Hitler's rise to power, however, put an abrupt end to the internationalization of legal thought in Germany. Rabel and Loewenstein, like many other legal scholars of Jewish descent, were forced into exile. It so happened that in 1942 the two Munich alumni were invited by the American Law Institute to join a committee ‘representing the major cultures of the world’. This committee was charged with the momentous task of drafting an international bill of rights for a new post-war global order. Their draft was later to become the single most important blueprint for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Against this backdrop the article attempts to identify the specific contribution made by Rabel and Loewenstein to the evolution of international human rights law.