Why We Read The International Lawyer ? Answers Parsed from Works of Two International Lawyers

• Author: Patrick Del Duca
• Position: Patrick Del Duca is Publications Officer of the ABA Section of International Law. A member of the California bar, he practices law with Zuber Lawler & Del Duca LLP.
• Pages: 87-109

Why We Read The International Lawyer –

Answers Parsed from Works of Two

International Lawyers

P

ATRICK

D

EL

D

UCA

*

The International Lawyer’s penetrating, permeating, multi-faceted, multi-

cultural, cross-boundary, cross-disciplinary, and global treatment of the

many dimensions of international law fascinates me, and no publication over

the last fifty years has so consistently engaged practicing lawyers in creating

that fascination. Nowhere else does such a diverse assortment of

practitioners of international law of all kinds lay out the issues that they

address in perspectives keenly grounded in both practice and theory. The

contributors to The International Lawyer and its readers share an appreciation

not only of the importance of the rule of law, but also an appreciation of how

an understanding of the law in multiple contexts and of how the law bridges

those contexts can advance the law and the interests of those subject to it, as

well as the careers of those who seek to practice it.

We, the readers of, and contributors to, The International Lawyer are

restless souls, ever seeking fresh perspectives on the challenges that we

confront in our professional lives, motivated not only by immediate client

needs, but also by a sense that the law is a global endeavor, fundamental to

human achievement. Of course, we are lawyers and hence not timid in

claiming that our chosen profession offers, perhaps even uniquely, the tools

to resolve the truly important problems, much as economists, political

scientists, philosophers, and theologians might likewise argue that their

respective professions afford.

I. Two International Lawyers

As illustrations of shared motivations of our community focused on the

American Bar Association Section of International Law and its flagship law

review—The International Lawyer—here I focus on the work of two

international lawyers, both of whom, deeply believing in the contribution of

the tools of law, have been willing to undertake what might broadly and

loftily be characterized as wrestling with the challenges of world peace and

global prosperity.

These lawyers are my father, Louis Del Duca—deceased November

2015—and Boris Kozolchyk, actively guiding the National Law Center for

* Patrick Del Duca is Publications Officer of the ABA Section of International Law. A

member of the California bar, he practices law with Zuber Lawler & Del Duca LLP.

THE INTERNATIONAL LAWYER

A TRIANNUAL PUBLICATION OF THE ABA/SECTION OF INTERNATIONAL LAW

PUBLISHED IN COOPERATION WITH

SMU DEDMAN SCHOOL OF LAW

88 THE INTERNATIONAL LAWYER [VOL. 50, NO. 1

Inter-American Free Trade.

1

Louis, born 1926, and Boris, born 1934, each

illustrate a lifetime of passion for the law and for probing in comparative and

international contexts not only how the law works, but also how and why it

can work better.

To illustrate the profundity of their motivations and ambitions, I have

selected one work of each. Concerning Professor Del Duca, it is what I

believe to be one of his first legal works published, an essay written and

published in Italian in 1953 to challenge Italian preconceptions of American

legal philosophy. Concerning Professor Kozolchyk, it is a recent textbook

that I hesitate to label career capping, because his career to date implies that

he is far from done with legal trailblazing. Nonetheless, it is a seasoned

lawyer’s work, reflecting decades of experience in its subject matter.

Notwithstanding the two works’ elaboration at opposite poles of progression

of legal careers, both illustrate the zest and the motivations that prompt us

all to be part of the community that reads and writes The International

Lawyer.

My allusion to the motivation of each as seeking “world peace and global

prosperity” is not the banality of world peace trivialized as a pageant

contestant’s stock response in the “personal questions” phase of competition

to subvert those who would be challenged by signs of intellectual

effervescence. Rather, it is world peace in the sense that the “Greatest

Generation” who fought the last world war understood in a personal way. It

is world peace conceived as an antithesis to the moral and material privations

that each of these two international lawyers experienced in their and their

families’ contacts with dictatorships, World War II, Cold War conflicts,

reverberations of colonialism, and their associated injuries to human dignity.

In a sometimes-confusing world of Brexit, post-Cold War ambiguity,

politicians focused on walls rather than bridges, and lone wolf terrorists, the

relevance of world peace and law to each other and that relevance as a

motivator of legal careers might appear remote. The works of the two

international lawyers here referenced, however, show this motivation to be

real, tangible, and universal in that it has driven their careers as sophisticated

practitioners of commercial law, both of whom in addition to practicing law

in the conventional sense of assisting clients, have also motivated generations

of law students from around the globe and actively contributed to law

reform in numerous countries, including the United States. How does the

building of a career as a practitioner of commercial law fit within the

umbrella of pursuing world peace? For these practitioners the links between

well-functioning commercial law and the prospects of peace and prosperity

are as self-evident as they were to Adenauer, De Gasperi, Monnet, Schuman,

and others who labored to re-stitch the fabric of Europe in the launch of

what has become the European Union.

Each of the two international lawyers whose work is here in focus left his

country of birth, respectively Italy and Cuba, as those countries wrestled

1. N

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, http://natlaw.com (last visited Oct. 14, 2016).

THE INTERNATIONAL LAWYER

A TRIANNUAL PUBLICATION OF THE ABA/SECTION OF INTERNATIONAL LAW

PUBLISHED IN COOPERATION WITH

SMU DEDMAN SCHOOL OF LAW