Originally from American Review of International Arbitration - ARIA

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This paper is devoted to § 1782 of Title 28 of the U.S. Judicial Code, and
particularly its application to private international tribunals. The subject was of
great interest to Hans Smit. It was one on which he spent substantial time and
effort, including the question of its application to international arbitration
tribunals. Among Hans’ most significant faculty positions at Columbia Law
School was the directorship of the Project on International Procedure, along with
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, at that time a research associate and associate director.
Smit was the leader of the team at Columbia that wrote a new and improved
version of § 1782 which Congress enacted in 1964. The team worked with the
U.S. Commission and Advisory Committee on International Rules of Judicial
Procedure, with Smit serving as a reporter for some ten years.1
As we all know, Hans was not shy in discussing his accomplishments. He
wrote that the changes in 1964 to the revised § 1782 were “drastic.” “[It] greatly
liberalized assistance given to foreign and international litigants and tribunals and,
in the thirty-five years that followed its enactment, has been applied in scores of
cases,” he wrote in the Syracuse Journal of International Law and Commerce in
1998.2 And since he wrote those words, it has been applied in many more cases.
Hans had said in 1965 that