Herbert Wechsler
1909-2000

Herbert Wechsler, who served from 1963 to 1984 as the Institute’s third Director, died in New York City on April 26. He was the Harlan Fiske Stone Professor of Constitutional Law Emeritus at Columbia University and had celebrated his 90th birthday the previous December.

A 1931 graduate of the Columbia University School of Law, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Law Review, Professor Wechsler taught for a year at Columbia before going to Washington to serve as a law clerk to Justice Stone of the United States Supreme Court. He rejoined the Columbia faculty in 1933 and remained affiliated with Columbia for the rest of his life, taking emeritus status in 1978. From 1944 to 1946, he was Assistant Attorney General in charge of the War Division, and his responsibilities included development of the legal framework for trying Nazi war criminals and service as chief technical adviser to the American judges at the Nuremberg Trials. In the 1960s he argued the seminal case of New York Times v. Sullivan in the Supreme Court on behalf of the Times. The case established the principle that, under the First Amendment, damages for defamation of a public figure can only be awarded upon a showing that the defamatory statement had been made with "actual malice."

Co-author of seminal casebooks that reshaped thinking about the federal courts and criminal law and author of the celebrated Holmes lecture at Harvard, "Toward Neutral Principles of Constitutional Law," Professor Wechsler was also Chief Reporter for the Institute’s Model Penal Code for the decade needed to bring that highly influential project to its conclusion. Professor Wechsler’s wife, Doris Wechsler, herself a lawyer and member of the Institute, has noted that he considered the Model Code his proudest achievement.

In 1963, shortly after final approval of the Model Penal Code’s Proposed Official Draft, Professor Wechsler succeeded the late Judge Herbert Goodrich as the Institute’s Director. During his 21-year tenure in that position, the Institute completed the Second Restatements of Conflict of Laws, Contracts, Judgments, and Torts, as well as the original Restatement of Foreign Relations Law of the United States and major portions of the Second Restatement of Property, various studies in federal taxation, the Federal Securities Code, the Model Code of Pre-Arraignment Procedure, the Model Land Development Code, the Study of the Division of Jurisdiction Between State and Federal Courts, and major revisions of the Uniform Commercial Code. The Institute’s Principles of Corporate Governance and the current Restatement of Foreign Relations Law of the United States were also conceived, initiated, and developed under his direction. Professor Wechsler retired as Director and became Director Emeritus in 1984, but he continued to be active in the Institute’s affairs as a member of the Council.

Professor Wechsler in 1993 became the third recipient of the Institute’s Henry J. Friendly Medal for his "outstanding achievement in promoting reform and clarification of the law" and for the extent to which his "outstanding intelligence, integrity, and devotion to the law ... enriched the subjects of Constitutional Law, Criminal Law, and Federal Jurisdiction, as well as legal thinking generally."