Professor Vagts was a renowned scholar of international law at Harvard Law School and one of the world’s foremost experts on transnational business problems and the laws affecting international commerce. He died on August 20 at age 84.
An ALI member since 1979, Professor Vagts worked on the Foreign Relations Restatement with Professors Andreas F. Lowenfeld and Louis B. Sohn, under the chairmanship of Professor Louis Henkin, the Chief Reporter. The Restatement has been widely cited by the courts, and a Fourth Restatement is now underway.
Born in Washington, DC, to an American mother and a German father, Professor Vagts fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1933. At 16, he entered Harvard College, earning a history degree in 1948 and graduating from Harvard Law School in 1951. He practiced with Cahill Gordon & Reindel in New York City and served as a judge advocate in the U.S. Air Force before joining the Harvard faculty in 1959. Professor Vagts also was a counselor on international law for the Department of State in 1976 and 1977 during the transition between Presidents Ford and Carter. Named the Bemis Professor of International Law in 1984, he ran the joint J.D./M.B.A. degree program at Harvard from its inception in 1969 until his retirement in 2005.
Professor Vagts wrote or edited more than 50 books and was the coauthor of two casebooks, Transnational Legal Problems and Transnational Business Problems. Currently in its fourth edition, Transnational Legal Problems is widely regarded as the leading compendium of materials for scholars and students in the field.
In 1991, Professor Vagts received the Max Planck Research Award for outstanding international research achievements, and in 2010, Cambridge University Press published a festschrift paying tribute to him: “Making Transnational Law Work in the Global Economy: Essays in Honour of Detlev Vagts.”