With profound sadness I learned of the passing of Professor Louis B. Sohn on June 7, 2006. I came to know him in 1971 when I first visited Harvard Law School as a junior student at the Law Department of National Taiwan University in Taipei, Taiwan. I did not meet him there; I read his classic textbook Cases on United Nation Law (1967) and was greatly impressed by the author’s comprehensive treatment of this complicated subject.
I never imagined that one day I would become Professor Sohn’s student. I went to Harvard Law School in 1976 after I had earned an LL.M. degree from New York University Law School. Six months later I was admitted to the S.J.D. program. I took Professor Sohn’s course Law of the Sea in 1977 and was immensely fascinated by the depth and the fun of the subject. Using the newly adopted single working paper at the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea, namely, the Informal Composite Negotiating Text (ICNT), Professor Sohn intelligently guided the students through the maze of the ocean law by a wealth of interesting case law and practices. Meanwhile, he was like a working encyclopedia, knowing almost everything about public international law. I enjoyed each and every class I attended. This is why he was so popular at the Law School. One student of his once remarked, “I would pay 100 dollars anytime to hear him talk.” I got an A from him and decided to ask him to be one of my S.J.D. thesis advisers. My subject was “Trouble in Oily Waters: Legal Problems of Seabed Boundary Delimitation in the East China Sea”.
What impressed me the most other than the course I took with Professor Sohn was the way he treated my thesis. I would submit part of the draft to him every two weeks and discussed with him at the next visit. I remember one day I found his corrections of the punctuations in my thesis. I was surprised that a world-class scholar would spend the time correcting punctuations for his students. I asked him why. He looked into my eyes and said, “Mr. Ma, if you don’t pay attention to small things, people will think you don’t pay attention to big things as well.” These remarks have far-reaching impact on my attitude on academic writing. I taught law for 18 years and supervised student thesis often. Every time I would tell them the above story to emphasize the importance of correct style.
I got my S.J.D. in 1981, worked for a while in a Wall Street law firm, and went back to Taiwan . I kept contact with Professor Sohn when he retired from Harvard shortly after I graduated. He went to University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia first and then to George Washington University in Washington, D.C. I invited him to visit Taiwan once to attend a conference. When I published my first treatise Legal Problems of Seabed Boundary Delimitation in the East China Sea (Baltimore: University of Maryland Law School, 1984, 306pp), he was nice enough to write a forward for me, an encouragement that inspired me for the rest of my life.
Professor Sohn will be remembered not only as a superb scholar on international law, sometimes referred to as the Father of Modern Law of the Sea (as compared Father of the Law of the Sea Hugo Grotius (1583-1945), but also a passionate teacher who really cares about his students.
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