One of the lesser-known, but important and influential, projects undertaken by The American Law Institute was the drafting of a Statement of Essential Human Rights. It all began in April of 1941, when William Draper Lewis, Director of the Institute, and Warren A. Seavey, Reporter for the Restatements of Agency, Judgments, Restitution, and Torts, took a moment off from working on their drafts and comments to begin a correspondence that would continue for at least four years. The subject of their letters was the specific question of what should happen to Germany after “the War” ended with what they hoped was the "destruction of Hitlerism," and the broader question of the role that the United States should take in the postwar world.
Although they disagreed on the proposed treatment of Germany after the war, their discussion led them to a shared belief that a just and permanent peace required the recognition of basic human rights, and that the Institute should draft a Statement of Essential Human Rights. Funded by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, a drafting committee was formed, with representatives from Britain, Canada, China, France, pre-Nazi Germany, India, Italy, Latin America, Poland, Soviet Russia, Spain, and Syria. Its goal was to define the indispensable human rights in terms that would be acceptable to all nations.
Before drafting the Statement of Essential Human Rights, committee members researched the constitutions of other countries and other primary documents relating to individual rights. Throughout the drafting process, Lewis and Seavey disagreed passionately about which human rights should be classified as fundamental. They came to the end of their work on the Statement “with a wide intellectual gulf separating” them. The Statement was never presented to the ALI membership for a vote, as the ALI Council did not feel that it was advisable for the Institute to draft an international bill of rights. The Council did direct that copies of the committee’s report be distributed to ALI members in 1944. As Lewis said at the 1944 Annual Meeting:
In distributing the report so that it becomes available for public discussion, the Institute has performed its full duty to the Foundations, the American Philosophical Society, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Commonwealth Fund, whose generous contributions made possible the work of the committee. . . .
But while I am personally deeply interested in seeing that this material is widely considered, I am sure I represent the opinion of the members of the Council when I say that the promotion of such public discussion, however useful, should not be undertaken by the Institute as an organization.
When the Statement was ultimately published by the Americans United for World Organization, Inc., in 1945, both men endorsed it, but an asterisk next to Seavey’s name led to a caveat that distanced him from Article 11 on Education and Article 15 on Social Security. The Institute presented its completed statement to the United Nations, but it was never adopted. In 1946, John P. Humphrey was appointed as the first Director of the Human Rights Division in the United Nations Secretariat, where he was the principal drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Before beginning his draft, he looked at other models. In his account of that process in his 1984 book Human Rights and the United Nations: A Great Adventure, he says that “the best of the texts from which I worked was the one prepared by the American Law Institute, and I borrowed freely from it.”
This piece originally appeared in the Spring 2005 edition of The ALI Reporter.
View the Statement here.