M. Pradier-Fodéré

The appearance of the eighth and final volume of M. Pradier-Fodéré's Traité de droit international public européen et américain seems a fitting occasion for a brief consideration of the life and works of this distinguished professor, counselor and author; more particularly is it appropriate to consider the extent and character of his services to that branch of public law dealt with in the above treatise, for it was to international law that he devoted the ripest years of a broad scholarship and the maturest judgments of an active life. M. Pradier-Fodéré was not simply and solely a student who looked out upon the hurly-burly of life from the secluded shelter of his study window; he was to no small extent a man of affairs who had come into close and intimate contact with matters of state on both sides of the Atlantic, and who, after a life of rich and varied experiences, settled down when over fifty to round out his life and his literary activity in the production of an extensive treatise on international law.