intimidation, and required courage, firmness, and judgement. These qualities O'Brien possessed pre-eminently. Retained by the Crown in all important cases, he was rapidly promoted serjeant (1884), solicitor-general (1887), attorney-general (1888). His attorney-generalship was historic. Mr. Arthur Balfour had become chief secretary in March 1887, and in July a Crimes Act was passed to counter the conspiracies then paralysing Ireland. O'Brien's administration of it restored the reign of law. His sagacity, patience, and fearlessness revived confidence. He worked indefatigably himself and chose his lieutenants well. The discreet power of Edward Carson (afterwards Lord Carson) found a complement in the astute erudition of Stephen Ronan (afterwards lord justice). Failure was unknown, though, where possible, every prosecution was tested microscopically on appeal. Peace ensued, and the way was clear for Balfour's regenerative measures when, in 1889, O'Brien became lord chief justice.
The great attorney-general proved a great chief justice, enhancing during twenty-four years the high traditions of that office. An atmosphere of dignified power distinguished his court. Penetrating to essentials, dispelling irrelevancies, he chiselled argument with common sense to sound decision. Urbane and humorous, knowing intimately the Irish human being, he won the confidence of juries by his rectitude and leniency. The bar and public regarded him with admiring affection. Massive, genial, hospitable, a fine conversationalist and many-sided sportsman, happiest in the hunting field, he was a thorough Irishman. He retired in 1913, having been created a baronet in 1891 and raised to the peerage in 1900. He died without male issue at Stillorgan, co. Dublin, 7 September 1914. He had lived down the propagandist misrepresentations which aspersed his earlier career, the expletives were dropped by his critics, and the best criterion of his popularity and personality is that Irishmen knew him best, not as the lord chief justice, nor as Lord O'Brien, but as ‘Peter’.
O'Brien, who was a Roman Catholic, married in 1867 Annie, daughter of Robert Hare Clarke, J.P., of Bansha, co. Tipperary, by whom he had two daughters.
[Hon. Georgina O'Brien, Reminiscences of the Right Honourable Lord O'Brien, 1916; F. Elrington Ball, The Judges in Ireland, 1221–1921, vol. ii, 1926; professional and personal knowledge.]
OPPENHEIM, LASSA FRANCIS LAWRENCE (1858–1919), jurist, was born near Frankfort-on-the-Main 30 March 1858, the third son of Aaron Oppenheim, by his wife, Adelheid Nossbaum, and was educated at the Frankfort gymnasium and at the universities of Göttingen, Berlin, Heidelberg, and Leipzig. From 1885 to 1891 he taught law in the university of Freiburg-im-Breisgau, and from 1891 to 1895 at Basle, being chiefly interested in criminal law; but in 1895 he settled in London, and henceforth devoted himself to the study of international law. He became naturalized in England in 1900. He lectured at the London School of Economics from 1898 to 1908, when he succeeded John Westlake [q.v.] in the Whewell chair of international law at Cambridge. He married in 1902 Elizabeth, daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel Phineas Cowan, and they had one daughter. He died at Cambridge 7 October 1919.
Oppenheim's chief work is International Law: A Treatise, of which the first volume, Peace, appeared in 1905, and the second, War and Neutrality, in 1906. It deservedly placed him among the foremost international jurists of his time, and was followed by his election to the Institut de Droit International, as associate in 1908, and as member in 1911. He belongs to the positive school of international jurists, who derive the rules of the science from custom and from the quasi-legislation of international conventions, and who regard it as the function of the jurist to ascertain and give precision to those rules, to criticize and suggest improvements, but not to create them, nor to select as valid only those of which he approves. Oppenheim protested against the tendency to deduce the law from phrases, too often uncritically accepted as self-evident truths; and he pleaded for the development among jurists of that wider sympathy with other nations which can only come from a study of their juristic systems and from the cultivation of an international outlook. He was joint author of the chapter on the laws of war on land in the official Manual of Military Law (sixth edition 1914) and was frequently consulted by the Foreign Office on points of international law.
The conduct of Germany in the European War horrified Oppenheim, and convinced him that the only hope of a better international order lay in the decisive victory of the Allies. He was not discouraged by the apparent overthrow of international law, pointing out that
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