Hersch Lauterpacht was born on 16 August 1897 to a Jewish family in the small town of Żółkiew, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, near Lemberg (now Lviv), the capital of East Galicia.
In the words of former ICJ President Stephen M. Schwebel, Judge Sir Hersch Lauterpacht's "attainments are unsurpassed by any international lawyer of this century [...] he taught and wrote with unmatched distinction".
[8] The Lauterpacht Centre for International Law at the University of Cambridge is named after him and his son, Sir Elihu Lauterpacht, CBE, QC, who founded the centre and was its first director;[9] Elihu remained actively involved in its work as Director Emeritus and Honorary Professor of International Law until his death in February 2017.
[citation needed] Samuel Moyn has suggested that Hersch was one of the few international lawyers actively campaigning for human rights in the late 1940s, and that he had "denounced the Universal Declaration as a shameful defeat of the ideals it grandly proclaimed".
[10] In the aftermath of the Holocaust Lauterpacht's thinking also included the question how this unpreceded event could be properly met by an international law, which was based on established rules and precedents.