[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 140 (Friday, September 30, 1994)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: September 30, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                      TRIBUTE TO ALBERT BLAUSTEIN

                                 ______


                            HON. DAN BURTON

                               of indiana

                    in the house of representatives

                       Friday, September 30, 1994

  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, on August 22, 1994, America lost 
one of its foremost constitutional scholars, Prof. Albert Blaustein of 
Rutger's University School of Law. Al Blaustein was a scholar of 
international repute, editor of the well-known ``Compendium of World 
Constitutions,'' and author of numerous books and scholarly articles. 
He was famous for his authorship and contribution to national 
constitutions all over the world, including Russia, Fiji, and Liberia.
  His monumental role in the legal evolution of mankind will long be 
recognized. To his last day, he was working hard on promoting democracy 
and the rule of law around the world. His friends will sorely miss his 
delightful personality and I am sure they all send their sincerest 
condolences to Al's wife Phyllis and their children.
  I commend to the attention of my colleagues the New York Times and 
Philadelphia Inquirer obituaries of Albert Blaustein.

            [From the Philadelphia Inquirer, Aug. 22, 1994]

                 Albert Blaustein, Constitution Expert

                           (By Reid Kanaley)

       Albert Paul Blaustein, 72, one of a handful of U.S. legal 
     scholars who have helped rewrite the national constitutions 
     of Eastern Europe since the fall of communism, died of a 
     heart attack yesterday.
       Mr. Blaustein lived in Cherry Hill. He was professor 
     emeritus at Rutgers University School of Law, Camden, where 
     he had taught the Constitution since 1954. At the time of his 
     death, he was in Durham, N.C., nearing the end of a three-
     week vacation of exercise, rest and dieting.
       The scholar and human-rights advocate had traveled the 
     globe since the 1960s, advising dozens of countries--from 
     Brazil to Fiji to Poland to Russia to South Vietnam and 
     Zimbabwe--on how to write new constitutions.
       ``My son calls me a Jewish James Madison,'' Mr. Blaustein 
     said in a 1991 interview in Moscow, where he had been 
     summoned to help draft the constitution for the new Russian 
     Republic.
       ``His knowledge of the constitutions of the world was the 
     most significant thing about him, but he was also a great 
     teacher,'' said Roy Mersky, a professor of law at the 
     University of Texas-Austin and a frequent collaborator of Mr. 
     Blaustein's.
       The two men were in the process of revising a book of 
     biographical sketches and statistics on the 108 justices to 
     sit on the U.S. Supreme Court.
       A son, Eric Blaustein of Cary, N.C., said Mr. Blaustein had 
     appointments today in Washington, D.C., where he had hoped to 
     press government officials to support human-rights issues in 
     Haiti and Latin America, and was due in Tokyo on Oct. 2 to 
     lecture on constitutional law.
       But, perhaps sensing that his life's work was nearing its 
     end, Mr. Blaustein told his son on Wednesday evening, ``Eric, 
     I have no regrets,'' the younger Blaustein said yesterday.
       ``He was not afraid to die,'' said his son, ``He said 
     nobody lived a better life than he did. He'd traveled. The 
     work he did made a difference. He leaves a legacy both in 
     print and in family.''
       As a constitution writer-for-hire, whose workload grew 
     immense with the fall of communism and the breakup of the 
     Soviet Union, Mr. Blaustein had said the job title he 
     preferred was ``custom framer.''
       In 28 years of helping countries draft new constitutions, 
     Mr. Bloustein consistently refrained from imposing the United 
     States' legal system on other nations. His tact was seen as 
     particularly useful in a nation such as Russia, where many 
     leaders are sensitive to accusations of aping the West.
       ``A constitution has to spring from native soil, to meet 
     the basic needs and wants of a given people,'' Mr. Bloustein 
     had said in the Moscow interview. ``I am not here to tell 
     them what to do. These people need a Russian constitution. I 
     am basically here to answer questions.''
       He was born in Brooklyn Oct. 12, 1921. He received his 
     undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan in 1941.
       A one-time Chicago police reporter, he relished the murder 
     stories of 50 years past and was noted for wearing gangland-
     era leather braces. The GI Bill enabled him to attend 
     Columbia University's law school after World War II, and he 
     developed an interest in constitutions while working as a law 
     librarian, first at New York Law School and then at Rutgers.
       His first overseas assignment was to help write a 
     constitution for South Vietnam in 1966. Since then he had 
     traveled to more than 80 countries to help draft blueprints 
     for governing.
       He personally wrote the constitutions of Bangladesh, 
     Liberia, Zimbabwe and Fuji. He had drafted the latter on the 
     same computer he played video games on during brief moments 
     of leisure at his Rutgers office.
       For Mr. Bloustein, the hallmarks of a good constitution 
     were clauses protecting the rights of minority groups and 
     ensuring separation of powers, freedom of speech and a 
     multiparty system. He disliked constitutions that imposed an 
     overly centralized bureaucracy and those that confused 
     fundamental rights--such as freedom of speech--with policy (a 
     guaranteed job for example).
       While working that first job in South Vietnam, he found 
     there was no easy reference work and decided to put one 
     together himself. The result was ``Constitutions of the 
     Countries of the World,'' which was first published in 1971. 
     Updated regularly, the collection has grown to 22 volumes. It 
     includes every nation's constitution and critical essays on 
     the history of each.
       Mr. Blaustein was a nearly compulsive collector. Several 
     years ago, his collection of more than 2,500 bars of soap 
     from every hotel in which he had ever stayed, all labeled, 
     dated and indexed, was purchased for a figure placed by the 
     family yesterday at about $1,500 by Ripley's Believe It or 
     Not Museum in Irving, Texas.
       A year later, Eric Blaustein said, his father sent him back 
     to the museum with large sachel of new soaps. The collection 
     was piled in a large antique bathtub, with a picture of Mr. 
     Blaustein on a nearby tripod.
       Mr. Blaustein also had collected more than 500 ballpoint 
     pens from around the world and he had thousands of airline 
     luggage tags stacked on an antique grocer's scale in his 
     cluttered corner office at Rutgers.
       At the time of his death, he was under contract with 
     Princeton Press to write his autobiography. ``I don't know 
     that he even started it,'' Eric Blaustein said yesterday.
       In addition to his son Eric Mr. Blaustein is survived by 
     his wife, Phyllis; son, Mark of Fort Lee, N.J.; a daughter 
     Dana Litke of Northfield, N.J.; a sister, Marjorie Simon of 
     Purchase, N.Y.; and four grandchildren.
       Funeral services will be held tomorrow at noon at Platt 
     Memorial Chapels, 2001 Berlin Rd., Cherry Hill. Interment 
     will be at Crescent Burial Park, Pennsauken.
                                  ____


                [From the New York Times, Aug. 23, 1994]

      Albert P. Blaustein, a Drafter Of Constitutions, Dies at 72

                        (By Richard Perez-Pena)

       Albert Blaustein, a law professor who dedicated nearly 
     three decades of his life to drafting constitutions for 
     national transition, died on Sunday at Duke University 
     Hospital in Durham N.C. after suffering a heart attack. He 
     was 72.
       A fervent believer that a constitution could help a nation 
     define its legal, political and moral identity, Mr. Blaustein 
     wrote the constitutions now in use in Liberia and Fiji, 
     contributed large parts of the constitutions of Zimbabwe, 
     Bangladesh and Peru and had a hand in the drafting of about 
     40 others, including those of Nicaragua, Romania and post-
     Soviet Russia
       From his home in Cherry Hill N.J., Mr. Blaustein, who 
     taught at the Rutgers University School of Law in Camden, was 
     frequently summoned by dissident groups as disparate as the 
     Inkatha Freedom Party in South Africa and a coalition of 
     lawyers in Nepal to help them stake out their positions in 
     drafting new constitutions. Those calls became frequent in 
     recent years as areas of the world, from Central America to 
     Eastern Europe underwent wrenching change.
       In a 1983 interview, Mr. Blaustein said: ``A constitution 
     is more than a structure and framework for government. It is 
     in many senses a nation's frontispiece. It should be used as 
     a rallying point for the people's ideals and aspirations, as 
     well as a message to the outside world as to what the country 
     stands for.''
       Mr. Blaustein would try to interject Western liberal 
     notions into the constitutions he drafted; in the 1970's he 
     tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade the leaders of the new 
     majority-rule government of Zimbabwe to grant equal rights to 
     women. But he acknowledged that for a constitution to work, 
     it must reflect a country's culture and history. ``We cannot 
     put constitutions together like prefabricated henhouses,'' he 
     said in the 1983 interview.
       While he praised the United States Constitution as a 
     document that had worked well, even in crisis--he noted that 
     ``when Mr. Nixon left power, the only person with a gun was a 
     policeman directing traffic''--he said that if he were asked 
     to revise it, he would make the right to privacy and freedom 
     of travel explicit provisions.
       Mr. Blaustein's contributions to nation-building began in 
     1966, when, at the request of the United States Government, 
     he traveled to South Vietnam to advise that country in 
     drafting a constitution.
       By that time, he had established a formidable reputation as 
     a legal scholar and as the author and editor of many books. 
     ``Desegregation and the Law,'' (Rutgers University Press, 
     1957), of which he was co-author with Clarence Clyde Ferguson 
     Jr., was a critical and commercial success. His other works 
     include ``The American Lawyer: A Summary of the Survey of the 
     Legal Profession,'' (University of Chicago, 1954), which he 
     wrote with Charles O. Porter.
       He taught at New York Law School in the mid-1950's and at 
     Rutgers from 1955 until his retirement in 1992.
       Born on Oct. 12, 1921, in Brooklyn, Mr. Blaustein graduated 
     from Boys High School at age 16. He graduated from the 
     University of Michigan at 19 and became a reporter with The 
     Chicago Tribune.
       He served in the Army during World War II and again in the 
     Korean War, attaining the rank of major. Between the wars, he 
     went to law school at Columbia University and practiced law 
     in Manhattan at his father's firm.
       He is survived by his wife, the former Phyllis Migden; a 
     daughter, Dana Litke of Northfield, N.J.; two sons, Mark 
     Blaustein of Fort Lee, N.J., and Eric Blaustein of Cary, 
     N.C.; a sister, Marjory Simon of Purchase, N.Y., and four 
     grandchildren.

                          ____________________