Pitt Law Professor Ronald A. Brand to Receive International Theberge Award Oct. 15

PITTSBURGH—Being named Pitt’s Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg University Professor in January was just the beginning of a banner year for University of Pittsburgh law professor Ronald A. Brand, founding director of the Center for International Legal Education in Pitt’s School of Law.

On Oct. 15, Brand will receive the Leonard J. Theberge Award for Private International Law at the meeting of the American Bar Association Section on International Law in Dublin, Ireland. The award honors persons who have made distinguished, long-standing contributions to the development of private international law. 

Candidates for the award, which was established in 1982, are nominated by the Section’s Private International Law Committee and selected by the Council of the Section. By resolution of the Council, the award was named in memory of Leonard J. Theberge, chair of the section in 1970-80 who had been, at the time of his death, president of the Media Institute, a business news study group, and past president of the National Legal Center for the Public Interest. Prior recipients include the late Philip W. Amram, expert on international private law who served as chair of the U.S. delegation to the 1972 Hague Conference on Private International Law and was the first to receive the award in 1983; the late Allan Farnsworth, a legal scholar on contracts who was a reporter for the 1981 Restatement of Contracts; the late John Honnold, William A. Schnader Professor of Commercial Law Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and an expert in private international law known as the father of the Vienna Convention; and the late Arthur Von Mehren, the Story Professor of Law Emeritus at Harvard Law School who formerly headed the U.S. delegation to the Hague Conference on Private International Law.

In addition to receiving the Theberge award, Brand will be awarded in November the degree of Doctor Iuris Honoris Causa by the University of Augsburg Faculty of Law in Germany to commemorate cooperation between Pitt’s School of Law and Augsburg. Brand has led more than two decades of close collaboration with the Augsburg Faculty of Law, beginning in 1987 with a U.S. State Department grant to celebrate the bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution. The two law schools have exchanged faculty and students and engaged in novel cooperative teaching experiences.

Earlier this year, in August, Brand was invited to teach a special course on private international law in the 2011 summer program at the Hague Academy of International Law at the Peace Palace in The Hague, the Netherlands. Titled “Transaction Planning Using Rules on Jurisdiction and Judgments Recognition,” the course was attended by more than 300 students from 67 countries. Brand was the only U.S. professor among the 15 who taught courses on public and private international law in the summer program.

Brand’s lectures will be published in the Hague Academy Collected Courses, one of the world’s leading sources of public and private international law scholarship.

The Hague Academy, created in 1923, is housed in the Peace Palace with its sister organizations, the International Court of Justice and the Permanent Court of Arbitration. The academy has been described as the most prestigious school for international legal matters in the world. Former U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali is president of its governing body, the Curatorium.

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