Schwebel, Stephen M

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The Memorial Service will take place on Thursday, October 1, 2026, from 4:30PM EST at the Cosmos Club, located on 2121 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington, DC 20008.   For those unable to attend the service in-person, you can participate remotely by viewing the live stream of the mass (please scroll up to see the video).

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Obituary

Stephen M. Schwebel, former Judge and President of the International Court of Justice, died on Thursday April 9th at his home in Manhattan at the age of 97. Since departing Washington DC in 2016, he lived primarily in South Woodstock, Vermont. He is survived by his wife, Louise Killander Schwebel, their daughters, Jennifer Garrett and Anna Harrington, and four grandchildren, Benjamin Harrington, Casper Harrington, Johnson J. Garrett and Georgina Garrett. The second son of Victor and Pauline Schwebel, and younger brother of Jacob Pfeffer (“Jack”) Schwebel, Stephen Myron Schwebel was born in Brooklyn, N.Y on March 10, 1929. While a high school student at James Madison High School in Brooklyn, he became absorbed by the founding of the United Nations. He joined the then League of Nations Association and took an active part in its student affiliate, which became the Collegiate Council for the United Nations, of which he eventually became national president. He was appointed a member of the board of directors of the American Association for the United Nations, which included Eleanor Roosevelt among other luminaries. In 1946, he won a scholarship to Harvard College, where he founded the United Nations Council of Harvard, which presented a succession of leading UN figures as campus speakers. He gave a weekly radio broadcast over Boston station WGBH, “This world this week”. He served in the UN Intern Program as a summer assistant to the first UN Secretary-General, Trygve Lie, in 1949. On graduation from Harvard in 1950 with highest honors in government, where he was the undergraduate commencement orator, he was awarded Harvard’s Frank Knox Memorial fellowship, which took him to Trinity College of Cambridge University where he was a student of the Whewell Professor of International Law, H. Lauterpacht. His senior thesis at Harvard on “The Secretary General of the United Nations, His Political Powers and Practice” was published by the Harvard University Press in 1952, an exceptional honor for an undergraduate thesis. During his stay at Cambridge, he interviewed the two then living former Secretaries-General of the League of Nations, Lord Perth (Sir Eric Drummond) and Joseph Avenol, recounted in a chapter of his book. In 1953, he spent a few months speaking at colleges in India under auspices of the U.S. Information Service. After his graduation from Yale Law School in 1954, he passed the New York Bar and joined as an associate with the New York firm of White & Case. It was appointed as counsel by Aramco, then owned by four major America oil firms, in arbitral proceedings brought by the Royal Government of Saudi Arabia. Aristotle Socrates Onassis had agreed with King Ibn Saud to set up a Saudi shipping company which by Saudi royal decree was granted the exclusive right to ship oil from Saudi Arabia. Aramco maintained that it alone had that right by the express terms of the 1933 Aramco Concession Agreement. From the outset of export of oil from Saudi Arabia, Aramco had chartered tankers to carry oil from Saudi Arabia to markets abroad. The arbitral tribunal upheld Aramco’s position and the royal decree was not enforced.

In 1959, Schwebel was appointed Assistant Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. With the Presidential election of Senator Kennedy in 1961, a number of Harvard professors joined the Kennedy administration. Among them, Professor Abram Chayes was appointed as The Legal Adviser of the State Department. He appointed Schwebel as Assistant Legal Adviser for United Nations Affairs. In that capacity, he served as the senior legal adviser of the U.S. Mission to the United Nations and as U.S. representative in the Legal Committee of the UN General Assembly. When the General Assembly requested the International Court of Justice to render an advisory on whether UN Members were legally bound to pay assessments for peacekeeping expenses, Chayes and Schwebel presented the U.S. legal position, which carried in the Court’s opinion. He took the lead in the State Department’s subsequent, unsuccessful effort to require UN Members to pay assessments for peacekeeping expenses. In 1967, Schwebel resigned from the State Department to accept a joint position of Executive Director of the American Society of International Law and Burling Professor of International Law at The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. In 1973, he returned to the Office of the Legal Adviser of the State Department, serving as a Deputy Legal Adviser. He led U.S. delegations in negotiations over principles of international law relating to “friendly relations” among States and a Mexican proposal for a Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States. When the Shah of Iran was overthrown and the staff of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran taken hostage, the then Legal Adviser of the State Department, Roberts Owen, and Schwebel argued on behalf of the United States in the International Court of Justice. Schwebel was elected a member of the International Law Commission of the United Nations in 1978. In 1980, when the U.S. Judge of the International Court of Justice, Richard Baxter, unexpectedly died, Schwebel was nominated to succeed him. He served on the Court 1981- 2000, and as President of the Court 1997-2000. His term on the Court was demanding in view of the sharp increase in the Court’s docket launched by Nicaragua’s case against the United States. Schwebel was concurrently appointed a member of the Administrative Tribunal of the International Monetary Fund and served as its first president, and subsequently as a member and president of the Administrative Tribunal of the World Bank. After retiring from the ICJ in 2000, he was frequently appointed as an arbitrator in international investment and other disputes. The World Bank appointed him as president of an arbitral tribunal between India and Pakistan under the Indus Waters treaty. Schwebel was the author of “International Arbitration: Three Salient Problems”, and of two collections of legal essays published by the Cambridge University Press, as well as legal essays and book reviews in the American Journal of International Law. Schwebel was a member of the Council on Foreign relations and of the Harvard Club of NYC; the Cosmos Club and the Metropolitan Club of Washington, D.C. and of The Athenaeum of London.

He was an honorary fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and an honorary Bencher of Gray’s Inn, London.