UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN
HONORARY CONFERRING
Monday, 2 December 2019 at 5 pm
TEXT OF THE INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS DELIVERED BY PROFESSOR IMELDA MAHER, DEAN OF LAW, UCD Sutherland School of Law on 2 December 2019, on the occasion of the conferring of the Degree of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa on BRIAN FRANCIS HAVEL.
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Professor Brian Havel is Full Professor and Director of the world-renowned Institute of Air and Space Law at Magill University Montreal. He is the first Irish person to hold the position in an Institute that is synonymous with academic excellence with an extraordinary reach and influence. He has held visiting positions and taught at the University of Oxford, Leiden University and Northwestern as well as having held positions with key international bodies including the World Economic Forum and the International Air Transport Association (IATA).
Professor Havel is a UCD law graduate, the first winner of the Bank of Ireland medal, the founder with emeritus Professor Paul O’Connor of our first ever exchange programme to De Paul University, Chicago where he was Distinguished Research Professor before moving to Magill. This first step has led to over 160 law students going abroad this year alone to our 50 partner universities and we are eternally grateful to Professor Havel for his role in creating what is one of the defining features of our law programmes.
It is our honour to have Professor Havel here today. He has an outstanding intellect with an immense curiosity. This is reflected in his extraordinary university career. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in law and in French and German and graduate diplomas in Human Rights and European Law. Having qualified at the Irish Bar, he first pursued a career as a New York attorney with a major New York law firm before taking a second LLM at Columbia University. At this point he could have proceeded directly to an academic career, but his intellectual curiosity led him instead to take a JSD, a Doctor of Science of Law at Columbia before moving to take up an academic post at De Paul in Chicago.
His scholarship on aviation law marks him out as a leading and authoritative voice in the field. His career has tracked and helped to shape a revolution in aviation from a protected national industry (some of us remember the £200 return airfares to London from Dublin in the 1980s) to open skies. His work is theoretically informed, addressing law and governance in aviation across the three legal domains of international law, the EU and the US. He locates legal changes in their political contexts having regard to laws as diverse as competition, the general agreement on trade in services, transport regulation, labour law and dispute resolution. His oeuvre of works in the field include three magisterial books including The Principles and Practice of Aviation Law written with G. Sanchez and published by Cambridge University Press in 2014. Beyond Open Skies: A New Regime for International Aviation, published by Kluwer in 2009 at 713pp marked the second major phase in his thinking after his 1997 book on Open Skies which came in at “only” 534 pp. This breadth of knowledge and analytical grasp is shared in language that a reviewer in the American Journal of International Law described as ‘crisp, clever, and creative’.
Professor Havel’s writings extend beyond this complex and rich field to other more eclectic concerns. He has undertaken an analysis of whether the United States Supreme Court would sanction supranational courts applying insights from Noam Chomsky’s theory of structural linguistics. He has also reflected on the nature of official public (or State) memory noting how it masks contestation. He shows (in over 100 pages) how the emotional (affective) memory that is unique to each individual creates a permanent potential for contestation and authenticity and sets a natural conceptual limit to the power of officially managed memory to contrive and control the past. In doing so, he draws on the work of Marcel Proust and critiques the work of the French social philosopher Maurice Halbwachs.
It is perhaps this interest in memory that led Professor Havel to his other, more work, his biography of his father, Miroslav Havel, who emigrated to Waterford after the second world war from the Czech Republic to be chief designer in what was then a fledging company, building on a glass-making heritage that the city had enjoyed in the eighteenth century. In this book, Maestro of Crystal, we experience the intellectual and personal generosity of Professor Havel who recounts the extraordinary story of a gifted artiste whose talents defined a key moment in Irish manufacturing history. I am sure Brian that your dad would be very proud of you today as we bestow this well-deserved honour on you, one of our most admired and illustrious alumni.
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Praehonorabilis Praeses, totaque Universitas,
Praesento vobis hunc meum filium, quem scio tam moribus quam doctrina habilem et idoneum esse qui admittatur, honoris causa, ad Gradum Doctoratus in utroque Jure, tam civili quam Canonico; idque tibi fide mea testor ac spondeo, totique Academiae.