News Story

Dean Schwab also Honored at the
French Supreme Court event in Paris

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Claire Germain, the Law School’s Edward Cornell Law Librarian and Professor of Law, received the Chevalier de La Légion d’Honneur for her efforts in bridging the American and French legal cultures.

The award, which originated in 1802 under Napoleon Bonaparte and is considered France’s highest honor, recognizes outstanding achievements in military and civil life. The honor was presented to her on July 17 in Paris by Vincent Lamanda, the Cour de cassation’s first president, a title akin to chief justice in the United States, on behalf of the president of the French republic.

The occasion was the dedication at the Cour de cassation library of the Cornell Center for Documentation on American Law.

Professor Germain received the award for her role in enhancing French-American relations and French knowledge of U.S. law by advocating for, assembling, and shipping the 13,000 volume collection of American case law and law journals. The collection makes use of duplicate copies in the Law School library in response to a request from the Cour de cassation for support.

“This is a very moving ceremony for me because I’m a citizen of both France and the United States and am a European at heart,” Professor Germain, after she was presented with the Chevalier de La Légion d'Honneur medal. She later said, privately, that she was especially honored because only about 23 percent of the award's past recipients have been women.

Professor Germain is an authority on legal research, technology, French law, and comparative law. She teaches courses on those subjects at the Law School and its Paris Summer Institute on International and Comparative Law. She joined the Cornell Law School faculty in 1993 after serving for many years as a law librarian and senior lecturer at Duke University Law School. She was president of the American Association of Law Libraries; chair of the American Association of Law Schools’ committee on libraries and technology; and executive board member of the International Association of Law Libraries. She was awarded a licence-ès-Lettres from the University of Paris III in 1971; a licence-en-Droit (LL.B.) from the University of Paris XII in 1974; an M.C.L from Louisiana State University School of Law in 1975; and an M.L.L. from the University of Denver in 1977.

Dean Schwab also was the recipient of a prestigious insignia at the July 17 dedication ceremony at the Cour de cassation in Paris: the Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Mérite medal. Also presented by Cour de cassation First President Lamanda on behalf of France’s president, the insignia was given to show appreciation for Dean Schwab's efforts in bringing to fruition the gift of the American law collection to France’s supreme court.

The insignia is given as a mark of respect to non-French citizens and others whom the French republic wishes to honor. The order of chivalry that it represents originated in 1963 under President Charles de Gaulle.

“When the officials of the Cour de cassation approached us with the idea of adding American legal materials to their historic collection, I was humbled that they would choose us and inspired by their vision of maintaining a permanent dialogue with other legal systems,” he said at the dedication ceremony.

Dean Schwab has examined issues in labor and employment law through empirical analysis, as well as from comparative law and economics perspectives. He has been a Fulbright senior scholar at Australia National University, a visiting fellow at Oxford University, and a consultant for the World Bank on reform of labor and employment laws in Eastern Europe and Russia. He became dean of the Law School in 2003 and has since overseen a range of initiatives to expand the Law School’s international and comparative law focus. He joined the Cornell Law School faculty in1983 after earning an M.A. in labor economics and industrial organization (1978), a J.D. (1980), and a Ph.D. in economics (1981) from the University of Michigan and clerking for the Hon. J. Dickson Phillips of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and for U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.