The message that came to me announcing David's death read as follows: “Now cracks a noble heart. Flights of angels have sung our prince to his rest.” These words of Horatio, uttered on the death of Hamlet in Shakespeare's play, encapsulated all of the sentiments that all who knew David held in respect of him—a noble heart, a prince of international law, who overcame much to become everything.

He was a son of immigrants, from Quebec. At age twelve his father suffered a crippling stroke. David, whose two older siblings were out of the home leading adult lives, shouldered heavy responsibilities until his father died three years later, and thereafter, more, even greater responsibilities.

Summers, he labored in the shade-grown tobacco fields of Connecticut under the burning sun. With no money for a college education, he was rejected by the United States Coast Guard Academy, medically, due to a disqualifying underbite. The solution? At age eighteen he suffered his jaw to be broken surgically and reset. Painful? You bet. But he then was accepted, became Commander of the Regimental Corps of Cadets, and graduated with honors.

During five years’ service as a commissioned officer he nearly lost his life as a diving officer in the Arctic, then Wales on a Fulbright grant, followed by distinction at Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law, where the legendary Stefan Riesenfeld declared David to be the best student he ever had taught.

Then this gentle, charming, totally honest, and ethical giant in just thirty-four years zipped through clerking at the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal, earning the Diploma of The Hague Academy of International Law, researching at the prestigious Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg, earning his Ph.D. in international law at the University of Leiden, becoming in short order an acknowledged scholar in a number of fields, a chaired professor at Berkeley, a Commissioner of the United Nations Compensation Commission, Chairman of the Institute for Transnational Arbitration, President of this Society (incidentally the service closest to his heart), Dean of the Dickson Poon School of Law at King's College in London, a barrister, a member of chambers, a Bencher of the Inner Temple, a much sought-after international arbitrator, and finally a Judge of the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal, and a Judge ad hoc in two contentious cases at the International Court of Justice.

And besides, he was just great fun.

David's guiding light throughout his life, to me, is well described by what a barely 23-year-old Abraham Lincoln wrote when announcing in the March 15, 1832 issue of the Sangamo Journal his candidacy for the Illinois State legislature: