A Swiss Law Professor’s Journey or How to Think Globally
We interviewed worldwide renowned Swiss lawyer and Professor Jens Drolshammer, author of “The Americanization of Swiss Legal culture” to find out how the United States shaped his works and life.
You are a Swiss lawyer who has now written a book on the Americanization of Swiss legal culture and have worked at Harvard for many years. How did you become so passionate about the United States? What life events made you want to understand Swiss-American law?
JD: You know, it all happened by coincidence. When I was 17 years old, I went to Oklahoma City for a one- year exchange program during my senior year in high school. I was the foreigner of the school and therefore the center of attention. I felt I had to represent my country as best as possible and was on my best behavior. I was living with a host family that was very well politically connected. My host father was an architect who built the Federal Court building of Oklahoma City and was also a good friend of the Editor in Chief of the Independence Missouri Newspaper, who himself was a good friend of President Truman. In 1961, these connections led to having the honor of holding a 2-hour discussion with President Truman, who asked me about Switzerland, federalism, and what it meant to not be part of NATO. My host family was also very good friends with Governor J. Howard Edmondson, who was a personal friend of President John F. Kennedy. So at the end of the year, all the students of the AFS program were invited to Washington, D.C., and we were able to meet the president himself.
As you can see, my introduction to the United States was clearly not by design but by life events that brought me to the most interesting people.
But my interest in the United States and their legal system didn’t come from just that time. When I went back to Zurich to finish my studies, I was very interested in internationalization and after studying at the University of Geneva and at the Graduate Institute of International Affairs, but before getting my attorney license, I won a scholarship to do a master’s in comparative law in Michigan, where I had my first course in Anti-Trust law, a subject that would shape my career but also lead me to become a research fellow at Harvard, that became my home.
During your first years at Harvard, what did you work on the most?
JD: When I arrived in Boston, I enrolled in the Government Department and took a course called Law of United Nations that was taught by a very famous law teacher, Professor Leo Gross. At the same time, I was working on my PhD thesis on Anti-Trust law and Harvard, having the largest law library in the world, allowed me to write a PhD thesis on Swiss Law right in that library. And if I may add, this library had more books than even a library in Switzerland itself would have. I eventually had to go back to Switzerland to present myself at the bar exam.
When you went to Michigan and then Harvard, what struck you as differences in the methods of learning law between Switzerland and the United States and the student life between Switzerland and the United States?
JD: Even as a foreign student and researcher at Harvard University, I had to take the exact same classes and exams as every other student. I discovered they read a lot in a very short period of time! I had to learn their methods before I could start learning in the class itself. We worked 3 hours for one hour of class, and this before the class! But everyone was very intelligent, and so many people from different countries and backgrounds. On campus there would be translators that would translate the American law into your language for you or explain how that particular law differed from the Swiss one while you were learning it.
At the time, what also struck me was the engagement the professors had towards your success; their goal was for you to be a successful graduate student, which in Europe is completely different because you work on your own. Even teachers with 30 years of experience would ask us, “How was class?” They put an emphasis on the importance of classrooms, never missing a class, teaching new practical methods. Such attention was new to me!
Another difference as a student on an American campus was the feeling of being part of a group or a community that is much stronger than in Switzerland. I lived in the lawyers club; we had dinners together, studied and succeeded together. On Saturdays we all went to the football game to cheer our university team.
After your American experience, you went back to Switzerland, finished your PhD thesis and completed your bar exam. How did the U.S. influence your first job that finally led you to become such a successful practitioner?
JD: In the post-World War II era, the U.S. economic expansion had just started and many lawyers in Europe and Switzerland wanted to be part of this trend and start law firms which could handle international matters and work with American law firms. This American influence was the lawyer’s competitive driver.
In the law firm I was working for at the time, we were assigned cases and with my past in the United States and English knowledge, I would receive the American cases. It is also important to note that at the time Switzerland did not have an Anti-Trust law and Mr. Homburger, with whom I was working at the time, wrote the first law book on Swiss Anti-Trust law.
Apart from being a law practitioner, you were in academia but also in the Swiss military. Did any of those experiences influence your current career and your relationship with the United States?
JD: It is well known that in Switzerland military service is mandatory for every male citizen and especially at the time a lot of people kept an active military career in addition to their traditional jobs. This is typically seen as a postwar fabric. So even after my bar exam and teaching at the university, I continued working for the Swiss military! Now it would be impossible to be a top lawyer, top professor at a university and also have a leading position in the military.
As Swiss-U.S. relations grew, with my experience with the United States and military knowledge, I was asked by St. Gallen University if I wanted to create an Anglo-Saxon curriculum for law with special topics on American law; so, why not? I created this curriculum from scratch with an American method, my past cases with American firms and my own books; I created a successful class! With 12–15 students, that is when my academic career took off.
At this time we are in the post-Cold War era. A difficult issue arose when it came to Swiss-American relations, dormant Swiss bank accounts. What was your involvement in that situation?
JD: We are in the late 1980s and 1990s. Switzerland had unfinished business with its own history and had to find its new position in Europe after WWII. We were only a few people in Switzerland that had studied the U.S. legal system and therefore we understood why the United States was making certain decisions regarding this matter. With my background, I was asked to participate as guardian or interpreter during negotiations in Switzerland about dormant accounts but also worked with companies such as Credit Suisse or UBS in defending their position.
After some time, you decided you needed to change and do something more than business and went back into academics. How did Harvard and The Anthology of Swiss Legal Culture become the next step in your life?
JD: By then I was 57 years old and I decided it was my turn to enjoy my kids, study music and live in an intellectually attractive environment. I continued to do consulting back in Switzerland but went back to Harvard as a professor and to make it my home. I decided to create and improve relationships between Swiss and U.S. law schools by creating the American Legal Culture Club. I invited four or five international professors and we tried to establish new modern tools of communicating about Swiss law in a structured manner and that is how The Anthology of Swiss Legal Culture was born.
But I didn’t stop there. I wanted to deepen my knowledge in the globalization of the Swiss legal system, factors that will influence a legal system, understanding the origin of our legal system, how it travels but also how it can change. I wanted to bring a new view on where our legal system will go. All these past experiences, research and encounters are the source of my new book.
You recently published your new book, The Americanization of Swiss Legal Culture. If you were asked to briefly explain what was in it, what would you say?
JD: How does law travel? How did Swiss law travel and how has it influenced or how has it been influenced by the United States before and after WWII? It is a very structured book with summaries, background texts, biographies, etc. It should be a tool, a platform of knowledge that is the basis for teaching or further research. We will see who uses this book and for what purpose. This is a book that you do not read from A-Z but you learn by chapter and grow from it.
It brings to the foreground historical interactions between the Swiss and the American legal systems that very few today are still aware of. This includes the influence of Swiss nationals on the early development of the U.S. Constitution and its practice, for example, via Albert Gallatin and his seminal legal opinion on the Louisiana purchase for then-President Thomas Jefferson. Vice versa, American constitutional thought heavily influenced the Swiss when our own Constitution was crafted in 1848. The book also covers a variety of more recent encounters between the two legal systems, be it in the realm of conflicts over jurisdiction as with regard to the recent tax issue and how it was solved through litigation and international agreements, as well as with regard to increasingly common features through what is called the Americanization of Swiss lawyers and Swiss law.
Washington, D.C., November, 2016
