The Lauterpacht Centre for International Law was founded in 1987. The name commemorates its first Director, Sir Elihu Lauterpacht (1928-2017) and his father Sir Hersch Lauterpacht (1897-1960).
Hersch Lauterpacht was born to a Jewish family in a small town in the eastern reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1915 he began studying Law at the University of Lemberg (now Lviv, Ukraine), but he was unable to take his final exams there because the university became closed to Jews. He moved to Vienna, and then to London, where he gained his PhD and began practising as a lawyer. He was a member of the prosecution team at the 1945-6 Nuremberg trials of leading Nazis, and from 1955 to 1960 a judge of the International Court of Justice.
