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Professor Robert Hudec (1935-2003)
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Robert Hudec, who has died at the age of 68, was among the leading
academic experts on international trade law. In a career spanning
four decades, he became an influential analyst of the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and World Trade Organisation. He also served as a member of several Gatt and WTO dispute settlement panels and as a consultant to the US government. Professor Hudec's first book was The Gatt Legal System and World Trade Diplomacy, published in 1975. This established him, together with John Jackson, now at Georgetown University, and Kenneth Dam, most recently deputy secretary of the US Treasury, as one of the founding fathers of the academic study of international trade law. Hudec collaborated extensively with international economists, particularly Jagdish Bhagwati of Columbia University. In 1990, they worked on analyses of US aggressive unilateralism in trade policy, which were published in a book co-edited by Bhagwati and Hugh Patrick, also of Columbia University, Aggressive Unilateralism: America's 301 Trade Policy and the World Trading System. Subsequently, Professors Bhagwati and Hudec collaborated on Harmonization and Fair Trade: Prerequisites for Free Trade, published in 1996. Before that, Hudec had already shown his unique ability to marry legal with economic analysis in Developing Countries in the Gatt Legal System, published in 1988, which challenged the then still sacrosanct principle of special and differential treatment of developing countries within the Gatt. Hudec also made original contributions to the study of dispute settlement within the Gatt and WTO. He was critical of the move to an automatic, quasi-judicial procedure in the WTO, which would, he feared, prove politically unsustainable. His worries proved prescient. Yet, always pragmatic, he did not advocate reversion to the earlier system, as he felt that retreat would impose still greater harm on the world trading system. Breadth of vision, curiosity, originality and rigour marked all Hudec's work. He was admired by practitioners, lawyers and international economists alike. He was a kind friend, a penetrating conversationalist and an outstanding teacher. Robert Emil Hudec was born on December 23 1934 and grew up in North Olmsted, near Cleveland, Ohio. He graduated from Kenyon College in 1956 and received a master of arts in 1958 from Jesus College, Cambridge, where he went on a Marshall Scholarship. He studied law at Yale, before serving as law clerk to Justice Potter Stewart of the US Supreme Court from 1961 to 1963 and then as assistant general counsel of the office of the special trade negotiations to 1965. Hudec joined the University of Minnesota in 1972, where was the first law professor to be appointed to an endowed chair. In 2000 he joined the faculty of the Fletcher School. He was also a member of the board of the American Journal of International Law, the world's leading journal in its field. He is survived by his wife, Marianne, two children and five grandchildren. |
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2002 The Fletcher School, Tufts
University |
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