Richard Young
VAN HORNESVILLE -- Richard Young, an international lawyer who did pioneering legal work for the Arabian-American Oil Company (Aramco) in its development of the oil fields of Saudi Arabia and was an authority on the law of the sea, died Saturday night at his home here. He was 92.
Young was educated at the Choate School in Wallingford, Conn., at St. Lawrence University in Canton, from which he graduated in 1940, and, after service in the U.S. Army intelligence unit during World War II, at Harvard Law School, graduating in 1947. At St. Lawrence, he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Beta Theta Pi.
He was for a dozen years the assistant to Judge Manley Ottmer Hudson, the first chairman of the International Law Commission, which led to more than three decades of practice of international law, including years based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, working on legal relationships between the American company and the Saudi government. He appeared often before the World Court at The Hague on matters pertaining to the law of the sea. But throughout his career, he maintained a law office in this hamlet near Cooperstown, in central New York, that has been his family's home for eight generations.
He was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a member of the American Geographical Society. He served on the U.S. State Department advisory committee on the Law of the Sea, as an advisor to the U.S. delegation to the United Nations Law of the Sea Conference in 1976-77 and as a member of the executive board of the Law of the Sea Institute at the University of Hawaii. He was also on the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law and The International Lawyer and chaired the Advisory Board of the International Law Center at the Southwestern Legal Foundation in Dallas.
Young also served for years as a member of the Herkimer County Planning Board and as a director of the former State Bank of Albany.
In academic activities, from 1962 to 1970 he was a consultant at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., and later served as adjunct professor at the College of Law of Syracuse University. He was elected a trustee of St. Lawrence University in 1969 and served for many years as the board's vice chair. He married a fellow trustee, Janet Nevins, in 1971. She died in 1990. St. Lawrence awarded him an honorary degree in 1988, and he became an emeritus trustee in 1989. He was a member of the University Club of New York.
Young left no immediate survivors, but more than 90 nieces, nephews, grandnieces and grandnephews. The family will announce plans for a memorial service at a later date.
Memorial donations may be directed to either St. Lawrence University or the Van Hornesville Community Corporation.
Published in TIMES-UNION (ALBANY, N.Y., USA), November 20, 2011: http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Richard-Young-sea-law-expert-2279683.php