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Hisashi Owada
There is an old oriental saying that �the real worth of a person is determined only after his coffin is sealed.� Sir Ian Brownlie certainly left a rich legacy. It is with profound sadness that I pay tribute to Sir Ian and commemorate his life and achievements. His death, which stunned his colleagues and friends, has brought home to us all that with his passing we have lost one of the greatest international lawyers of our generation. Sir Ian was a towering figure, even amongst giants of international law from all corners of the world.
It was my great privilege to have known Sir Ian for over fifty years. My first encounter with him came in 1955, at which time Ian and I were both graduate students of international law at Cambridge University. Newly arrived from faraway Japan, I had just been accepted to join a group of young research students, while Ian had moved from Oxford to spend a year at Cambridge as the Humanitarian Trust Student in Public International Law. In those days Cambridge was a �Mecca� for aspiring young international lawyers from all over the world. Professor Robert Jennings had recently succeeded Sir Hersch Lauterpacht as the Whewell Professor of International Law, after Sir Hersch left to assume his new position as a Judge of the International Court of Justice. Professor Jennings�s monthly evening seminars, organized in his room at Jesus College, attracted a distinguished crowd of international lawyers and a group of students, who would later make names for themselves in the field of international law. These included illustrious personages, such as Lord McNair (a former President of the International Court of Justice), Sir Hersch Lauterpacht (who, despite being based in The Hague, often participated in the seminars), Kurt Lipstein, Clive Parry, and Elihu Lauterpacht, together
