Andreas F. Lowenfeld, a giant in the field of international and comparative law who served on the NYU Law faculty for 47 years and took leading roles in two projects of The American Law Institute, died on June 9 at his home in Riverdale, New York. He was 84.
Professor Lowenfeld, known to friends and colleagues as Andy, was one of three Associate Reporters on the Restatement Third, The Foreign Relations Law of the United States, a two-volume work led by Chief Reporter Louis Henkin and published in 1987 that proved to be very influential both in the courts of the United States and around the world.
“Andy’s death marks the end of an era because he was the last surviving Reporter from that tremendously important project,” said ALI Director Richard Revesz, who was also Lowenfeld’s colleague and dean at NYU Law for many years. “We are just now embarking on the Fourth Restatement of Foreign Relations Law, and it’s fair to say that the Reporters who are taking up the work on this project are very much standing on the shoulders of Andy and his colleagues, who did such a spectacular job in this area in the 1980s.”
Professor Lowenfeld was also a Reporter, along with his NYU Law colleague Linda J. Silberman, on ALI’s Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Judgments, published in 2006.
Elected to the ALI in June 1978, Professor Lowenfeld also served as an Adviser on Principles of Transnational Civil Procedure, and was on the Members Consultative Group for Restatement Third, The U.S. Law of International Commercial Arbitration. He was also part of the ALI delegation to the Hague Conference on Private International Law.
The author of more than 18 books and treatises and 115 law review articles, Professor Lowenfeld also litigated before the Supreme Court of the United States, the Iran–U.S. Claims Tribunal, and the International Court of Justice.
Professor Lowenfeld died less than two months after the death of Elena, his wife of 51 years. According to the August 1962 announcement of their wedding in The New York Times, Elena Machado was a teacher of classical guitar and a native of Cuba whose father was the Ambassador of Cuba to the United States from 1950 to 1952. The wedding announcement also noted that Professor Lowenfeld’s parents were both members of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and that his grandfather, Raphael Lowenfeld, was the biographer of Leo Tolstoy and the founder of the Schiller Theatre in Berlin.
Andreas Frank Lowenfeld was born on May 30, 1930, in Berlin, Germany, to a family of German-Jewish doctors. He came to the United States as a refugee from Nazism at age 8. After graduating with distinction from Horace Mann School, he studied at Harvard College and earned a law degree at Harvard Law School in 1955. He served in the U.S. Army for two years and then went on to practice law with Hyde and de Vries in New York.
His career took an important turn when he was hired to work in the Legal Adviser’s Office of the U.S. Department of State. In more than five years in that office, he held several posts and provided counsel to President John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and later to President Lyndon Johnson.
Professor Lowenfeld is survived by his son, Julian, and daughter, Marianna, and three grandchildren.