International Relations ♦ SAILS Essay 64 Va. J. Int’l L. 357 (2024)

A Short History of the Early History of American Student-Edited International Law Journals

HARLAN GRANT COHEN

While to some the “invisible college of international lawyers” may invoke images of open spaces between buildings and airy quads, to others the picture will be something much more clubbish and cloistered. And at least at their start, American student-edited international law journals decidedly resembled the latter. The Harvard International Law Journal began as the Bulletin of the Harvard International Law Club. Its first issue in 1959 detailed the club’s lectures and events, including a sherry party1 and membership growth from thirteen to thirty-three. “The principal function of the Club [was] the sponsorship of talks both by men actively engaged in the field of international law and by graduate students of the Harvard Law School.” (Its first two editors were future Boston College Law Professor Charles Baron4 and Wilmot Reed Hastings, a future Nixon administration lawyer whose son would co-found Netflix.) The first Bulletin also included some notes from recent Club alumni, detailing new jobs and babies. Young alumni writing in included future Panamanian diplomat Carlos Alfredo Lopez-Guevara, future Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland10 Krzysztof Skubiszewski, future member of the United Nations International Law Commission and Iran-United States Claims Tribunal George H. Aldrich and future Deputy Premier of Quebec14 Jacques-Yvan Morin. The second issue included a comprehensive Club alumni directory…