Tobias Asser

Origins and early life

Tobias Michael Carel Asser was born in Amsterdam on 28 April 1838 into a family of lawyers, the son of a judge of the Dutch Supreme Court and the nephew of a minister of justice. The Biografisch Woordenboek van Nederland records that he grew up in a Jewish family prominent since the early nineteenth century, that his father and uncle were leaders of the Jewish community, that he sat on the board of the Netherlands Israelite Seminary from 1882 to 1887, and that probably around 1890 he broke entirely with Judaism, joining no other church.

He took his doctorate in law at Leiden in 1860 and in 1862 became professor at the Athenaeum in Amsterdam, later its university.

Work and career

He co-founded the Revue de droit international et de législation comparée and, at Ghent in 1873, the Institute of International Law, which he later led. Convinced that shared rules of private law would serve peace, he had the Dutch government convene the Hague conferences on private international law, which he chaired in 1893, 1894, 1900 and 1904 and which produced treaties on civil procedure, marriage, divorce and guardianship.

Legal adviser to the foreign ministry from 1875 and on the Council of State from 1893, he was a Dutch delegate to the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907. In 1902 he sat on the tribunal that heard the first case of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, the Pious Fund dispute between the United States and Mexico.

Recognition

The 1911 Nobel Peace Prize was divided equally between him and Alfred Fried, his half “for his role as co-founder of the Institut de droit international, initiator of the Conferences on International Private Law at the Hague, and pioneer in the field of international legal relations”.

Later years

He died in The Hague on 29 July 1913, ten years before the Hague Academy of International Law he had worked for opened; his law library, the Asser Collection, is in the Peace Palace.