Robert Kurt Woetzel

Robert Kurt Woetzel (December 5, 1930 – September 6, 1991), professor of international law, was for many years a leading proponent for the establishment of the International Criminal Court.

Woetzel’s parents were German, his mother Jewish. The family left Germany because of its growing anti-Semitism, but before Hitler was in power. Woetzel was born in Shanghai, where his father was a chemical engineer. Following the conclusion of the Second World War, Woetzel moved to New York City. After receiving an A. B. degree from Columbia University (1952), Woetzel served in the American army (1954–1956), earned a Ph. D. at Oxford (1955) and a law degree at Bonn University (1959). He also served as a legislative assistant for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1956, and was a personal aid to Adlai Stevenson during the 1956 Democratic Convention, where Stevenson became the Party’s nominee for President. At Oxford, he became close friends with A. N. R. Robinson, who in 1989, as Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, reintroduced a proposal for an International Criminal Court to the United Nations General Assembly. An earlier UN effort to create an international criminal court had failed in the early 1950s due to the Cold War.

Woetzel’s doctoral dissertation, on the legality of the Nuremberg trials, was published as The Nuremberg Trials in International Law. His main purpose in The Nuremberg Trials was to defend the basis of the Nuremberg trials in international law, opposing legal scholars who had argued that the trials were ex post facto and illegal. However, he also expressed the hope that the Nuremberg trials would eventually lead to the establishment of an international criminal court.

From 1959 through 1964, Woetzel taught international law at Fordham University and New York University. In the mid-1960s, he was a Senior Fellow of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California. From 1968 until 1980, he taught at Boston College. He then moved to Los Angeles, where he taught as an Adjunct Professor at Pepperdine University, the University of Southern California, the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of California at Santa Barbara.

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