Personal Recollections^*1

Gaetano Arangio-Ruiz

A.C.: Of the many international lawyers you have met during your career who impressed you most?

A.R.: In addition to Perassi, Morelli and Ago, I would say Kelsen. I met Kelsen because when I was at the College of Europe I managed to get him as a visiting professor for three lectures in 1952 or 1953 ( I think it was the spring or winter of 1953). There are three small episodes I can relate to you.

First, when I went to pick Kelsen up at the station at Bruges, the man who came off the train had such a young face that I hardly recognized him. I had seen his picture in the Recueil de Cours where he also looked rather young. I thought I would meet an elderly fellow. Instead he looked as young as in the Recueil, the course on international law and municipal law he had given in 1932. So I was rather struck by this.

There was also something else that struck me. Since most visiting professors were from the field of economics, and indeed there had been some important economics lecturers only a few days earlier, I introduced him to the students by saying that we had here a champion in the field of law and I hoped they would enjoy his lectures. The result, however, was that the second and third lectures were attended by so few students that I had to go and rustle up some teachers, professors and assistants, and anyone else who was available so that he would not get the impression that nobody wanted to listen to him.

A.C.: Was he a bit tedious?

A.R.: Certainly not for me. But he was very abstract for the student audience. The majority of the College of Europe students were not from law schools, and so the lectures were very hard for them to understand. I do believe, though, that they should have made a greater effort.

Then, because Kelsen was not engaged in conversation by the students after the lectures, we were free to go and walk about Bruges. And this is the third episode that I wanted to recount. Kelsen liked trees very much so we visited the Bruges parks. I tried to get into a discussion with him on the relationship between international law and municipal law - I had just published my book on international law persons, especially concerning the state in the sense of international law. Kunz wrote a review of that work in the American Journal of International Law, arguing that one of the purposes of my book was to prove the strength and the validity of the dualist theory; he said that my book was thought-provoking, searching, etc., etc., but, in his opinion, I had not demonstrated the validity of the dualist, as opposed to the monistic, view, which Kunz incidentally shared.

When I started discussing this with Kelsen, he pretty quickly dismissed my argument with the very simple statement that there was certainly a flaw in his theory, but he was the only one to know where that flaw was. He said it was no use for me to try to convince him. I told him that the strength, or the greater strength, that everybody saw in the monistic theory was the appeal that theory had for people who believed in the unity of mankind at one point under a universal legal system - a system in which international law would be just the superior part of a universal law and the legal systems of states would only be a part of the whole. I said that in spite of this I believed that from a scientific point of view the monistic standpoint was unduly helped by the fact that the dualists had never really studied the state - as I believed I had done - from the viewpoint of international law: I mean der Staat im Sinne des Völkerrechts.

But clearly, it was useless for me to try to have a good argument with him. Despite my admiration for his tremendous powers of logic, and despite the fact that I accepted much of his general theory of law, I was rather disappointed. I did feel that even though I was only a beginner as a scholar, he could have been a little less conceited in our exchange of views.

A.C.: You are undoubtedly familiar with Kelsen's commentary on the UN Charter. What is your opinion on it?

A.R.: Even though this work was written a long time ago and was indeed one of the earliest commentaries, together with the famous article on collective security and collective self-defence published in the AJIL in 1948, to be written on the Charter, I believe that nobody can seriously deal with any issue of Charter interpretation without at least consulting Kelsen's Law of the United Nations. When I use the book, though, I am often puzzled by Kelsen's incredible ability to play the Devil's Advocate with himself. He manages to suggest more than one interpretation on many issues. He does so, for instance, with the question of `Chinese representation', with the definition of enforcement action and with the interpretation of paragraph 2 of Article 94 of the Charter. Kelsen's ingenuity in this respect is of course very useful. But I find it disconcerting at times. It looks somewhat as though he were playing a game with the text or with the reader.

^{1 *} The following extracts are taken from a forthcoming publication of in-depth interviews with leading international lawyers. The interviews were conducted by Antonio Cassese, member of the EJIL Editorial Board, in 1996, 1993 and 1995, respectively.

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