[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
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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.
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