Exile and Access: Lilly Melchior Roberts and the Infrastructures of International Law

Abstract

In her two consecutive and yet closely interwoven legal careers, as a corporate lawyer in Berlin’s premier transnational law firm in the years of the decline of the Weimar Republic and as a law librarian and bibliographer in one of the world’s leading law libraries at the height of the Cold War, Lilly Melchior Roberts (1903 – 1966) was part of an intellectual project that encompassed the disciplinary fields of international law, comparative law, and the emerging field of European legal integration, inspired by conceptual frameworks and perspectives of transnational law. In this chapter, on a biographical journey from Hamburg and Berlin to Ann Arbor, challenging well-worn distinctions between content and infrastructures, scholarship and practice, faculty and library, the German-Jewish émigré lawyer Lilly Melchior Roberts will be portrayed as a transformative actor in the emerging field of transnational (and, in particular: European) legal studies as well as in the disciplines of comparative and international law.

Keywords: International Law, European Law, Comparative Law, Transnational Law, Legal History, Women, Jewish Lawyers, Exile, Library