Sydney M. Cone III

Emeritus C.V. Starr Professor of Law
Emeritus Director, Center for International Law

 

“I like to think of my 40-plus years in the law firm as a series of wonderful challenges and opportunities cropping up all over the globe—Brussels, Paris, Frankfurt, Moscow, Tokyo, and above all, New York,” says Sydney (Terry) M. Cone III of his many years as partner at the venerable New York City firm, Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton.

Professor Cone, who is now senior counsel at the firm, has been resident in the firm’s Paris, Brussels, New York, and Washington offices, and was instrumental in establishing the firm’s Tokyo and Frankfurt offices and its representation of post-Soviet Russia. He is an expert in international business law, teaches courses on international finance and international economic law, and has published articles in both fields. His book, International Trade in Legal Services, was published by Little, Brown and Company in 1996.

Professor Cone has done work in the area of, and has written about, multidisciplinary practice as well as aspects of the International Criminal Court. He is an authority on the rules regulating the practice of lawyers outside their home jurisdictions.

Professor Cone joined the faculty at New York Law School in 1996 as the first C.V. Starr Professor of Law and as founder and director of the School’s Center for International Law.

“The professor part was new but rather straightforward,” he says. “I started teaching International Finance, about which I actually knew something, and through an intensive process of dealing with recognized authorities on international trade I managed to create a course called International Trade Disputes. That was fun.” He still teaches those subjects and International Business Transactions. He has also been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School.

“Creating a brand new Center for International Law was quite a different sort of challenge,” Professor Cone says. The Center (and the C.V. Starr Professorship) had been made possible by funding from the Starr Foundation. The Center started by organizing a series of symposia on international subjects in the areas of finance, trade, and human rights. The Center has since brought a number of distinguished lecturers to the Law School as part of its series of C.V. Starr Lectures and Otto Walter Lectures in International Law, including Dean Anne-Marie Slaughter of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, and Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel. It also publishes a bi-annual award-winning newsletter, The International Review, on global issues in law.

“Now, we have another exciting challenge,” Professor Cone says, referring to the leading role of the Center for International Law in developing the Law School’s honors program (the Justice John Marshall Harlan Scholars Program) named for its distinguished alumnus and U.S. Supreme Court justice, and also a separate International Associates Program. He emphasizes that the Center works with individual students, to help each of them customize their studies at the School in order to develop their knowledge in selected areas of international law, and thereby to realize their ambitions in those areas.

Professor Cone is a summa cum laude graduate of Haverford College and a graduate of Yale Law School where he served as Editor in Chief of the Yale Law Journal. Professor Cone lives with his wife, an art historian, in Manhattan.