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THE GLOBAL LAW AND POLICY INITIATIVE
Introduction of Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke
by Dean Henry H. Perritt, Jr.
September 19, 1997
Good morning, I'm Hank Perritt, dean of Chicago-Kent College of Law. I would like to welcome you to Illinois Institute of Technology and to Chicago-Kent. I would like to begin by thanking some organizations and individuals that helped make it possible for us to launch today our Global Law and Policy Initiative. The World Trade Center Chicago, the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, the Mid-America Committee, and the International Strategy Forum are co-hosts of Ambassador Holbrooke's address. James C. Peterson, Craig Duchossois, Mickie Voges, Robert Forney and April Major put us in a position to launch the Global Law and Policy Initiative today.
I can't think of any more fitting way to launch this initiative than to have Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke with us. Ambassador Holbrooke, you have, over your career, inspired citizens of the world to think new thoughts about the world. When you were Ambassador to Germany, you helped the American Administration and Western Europe to think about how a unified Germany could contribute to peace in the context of an enlarged NATO.
In your service in Bosnia -- which perhaps is best known to the American people -- you succeeded where other people had failed. Your creativity in designing institutions, memorialized in the Dayton Accords, represents the best kind of institutional force for the new world order because in the Dayton Accords, you made it possible for there to be relatively autonomous ethnic units in Bosnia which are at the same time part of an overall Bosnian nation.
More generally, as a career foreign service officer, you have inspired a whole generation of professionals, setting an example of how individual professionals can make a difference in the world and how individuals can help solve problems that seem completely in intractable. That kind of inspiration to young professionals and professionals-to-be is terribly important at a time of cynicism and even helplessness about the forces at work in the world.
The kinds of inspiration that you have generated are important in this new world. It's a world in which we are seeing the convergence of all kinds of things that previously have been separate. Foreign policy is coming together with business policy. Both of those policy arenas are coming together with intellectual compartments such as: public international law and private international law, which previously were pursued separately from each other, and altogether too separately from the policy arena.
Now, with these convergences, there is a need for some new intellectual capital. There is a need for people in the academy to work together with people from the policy arena to come up with some new answers to questions like: "Can we make collective security work?"; "How can we make collective security work in a framework that is limited by constitutional restrictions in U.S., Germany, Japan and elsewhere?"; "What should be the relationship between opening up trade and enforcing human rights norms?"; "Can centralized monetary authority in Europe function without strong federal institutions that provide a framework for performing other political roles."; "What is the right balance between national and international considerations and immigration in refugee policies?"; and "Can we formulate labor and environmental standards to can be part of international trade agreements?"
And one can go on a on. It is a long list of things with respect to which we need new intellectual capital.
But we need something more than that. We also need a new kind of international lawyer. Because it's going to be a new kind of international lawyer -- and similar professionals -- who help emulate the kind of thing you did with the Dayton Accords and the kind of thinking you stimulated about the structures for a unified Germany -- the construction of new kinds of institutions in an international context. That's the sort of work that the people who come through law school and other places of professional education must be equipped to do in the 21st century.
That's why we launched our Global Law and Policy Initiative. We want to respond to that challenge. And we want to act on your inspiration.
This initiative is meant to capture some of the synergy among our Library for International Relations, work the faculty of Chicago-Kent is already is doing with respect to international institutions, and the lessons that IIT has learned from its many years of organizing professional engineering education around the world.
We want our initiative to do more programs like this, not only to increase public awareness of public issues and of the work of people like you, but even more important, to link the achievements in the public policy arena with the intellectual life of the university. One of the things we will do later today is talk explicitly about your perspectives on the kind of scholarship and research that would be most useful -- now law faculties and other academic people can support real-world policy making.
A part of our initiative also is to make sure that we have the organizational capacity to carry these things forward. In that regard I would like to introduce Charles Rudnick. Charles is presently the American Bar Association CEELI representative in Sarajevo and will be joining Chicago-Kent as Assistant Dean for International Law and Policy Development in December. He will help make sure that we are all well organized in pursing this initiative.
Ambassador Holbrooke, there is no one better suited to be here to symbolize the launch of this Global Law and Policy Initiative. We welcome you to Chicago-Kent and IIT.
Text of Ambassador Holbooke's Speech