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A Brief History of the Institute

 

Professor Heinrich Kronstein the Institute's first director, had fled Germany in the 1930s and spent more than a decade studying and teaching at the law schools of Columbia University and Georgetown University.  Following World War II he returned to Germany to work for the reconstruction of legal education.  A result of Professor Kronstein's labor was the the International Law Institute.

The Institute was founded in 1955 at the Georgetown University Law Center.  A sister institute, the Insitut für Auslandisches und Internationales Wirtschaftsrecht, was founded at the same time at Johannes Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany; it continues its work today.  Professor Kronstein believed that closer ties between European and American legal systems would facilitate business and trade.  The Institute's early years were marked by scholarly work and academic exchanges.

Beginning in the early 1970s - under the leadership of a new director, Professor Don Wallace, Jr., of Georgetown  - the ILI expanded its focus to include professional training in the legal, economic, and financial problems of developing countries.  An early collaborator in this work was Professor Robert Hellawell of Columbia University Law School.

The earliest courses offered were Foreign Investment Negotiation and International Procurement.  Since then the curriculum is has evolved to reflect, and promote, the centrality of the private sector and an enabling role on the part of the public sector in promoting the conditions for economic growth.  This direction was heightened in the early 1990s when the Institute's when the Institute's work broadened to include the problems facing nations formerly part of the Soviet Union as they began to make the transition to market economies and the rule of law.

Today the International Law Institute is an independent, not-for-profit organization.   It continues to work closely with Georgetown University, as well as with numerous corporations, international organizations, and governments.