Tribute to James Richard Crawford, delivered Jesus College Cambridge, Saturday 28 May 2022

Abstract

James Crawford was a father, a husband, a sibling, a friend, a colleague. He was also the pre-eminent international lawyer of his age, a scholar, an advocate, an arbitrator and, at the end of his life, a judge. James was born in Adelaide, South Australia, in 1948, the first of seven children, his mother a nurse, his father a company director. There was law in the family, his maternal grandmother being only the second woman to graduate in law from the University of Adelaide. He came of age in the 1960s, already an independent spirit, a child, as he put it, of the ‘Vietnam generation’, already with an early republican instinct: as a schoolboy, he recalled, ‘I once had to sit in the sun for five hours waving my little flag and saw the Queen pass by for literally one minute... I was not terribly impressed’. He studied at Adelaide University (law, with history, English and international relations). The combination defined him, including a life-long interest in literature and words, but he opted for the law: a doctorate at Oxford and study under Professor Ian Brownlie. From the outset, he had an intensely pragmatic approach to the idea of an international rule of law—I am a ‘naïve positivist’, he once said, never himself much attracted to theory, but deeply respectful of others who were. The thesis became a book, on The Creation of States in International Law, today a classic that defines the field and would inform later engagements: Quebec’s secession from Canada; Scottish independence; and the decolonisation of Mauritius, including Chagos, from British colonial rule. Then back to Australia, as an academic: Adelaide, then Sydney. His interests broadened and deepened: he liked to challenge dogma—on the Australian Law Reform Commission he spearheaded the recognition of Aboriginal customary laws in Australia’s legal order. He qualified as a barrister, writing about Australian courts. He published the Rights of Peoples under international law, an early foray into matters of self-determination. You get the gist: rule or domination by others was a leitmotif of his intellectual style and product. In 1992, he returned to Britain as the Whewell Professor of International Law, and a fellowship at Jesus College Cambridge, a place he called home. A generation of international lawyers came to appreciate a mind that was sharp, witty, open, direct, engaged. He served as director of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, chaired the law faculty, and was a highly engaged teacher: his 70 doctoral students is surely a record. His protégés crossed culture, politics and identity, entering academic life across the globe, a lasting legacy for his ideal of international law as an ‘open system’: real, practical and forward