MARK JOELSON

JOELSON--Mark Rene, a leading international antitrust lawyer and scholar in the U.S., died in Arlington, VA, on September 23 at the age of 85. Joelson was born in Paris, France, in 1934, in the tumultuous period leading up to World War II to a Latvian- born Jew, Michel Joelson, who had fled Communist Russia in 1917, and an Austrian Jew, Helene Streicher. In 1941, the Joelson family escaped from Paris just before the Nazis occupied the city. Helene, who had been diagnosed with breast cancer, died shortly after the family reached New York. Michel moved to Indianapolis to work for a family business. Mark stayed in New York, and Helene's mother Elsa arrived from Vienna to take care of young Mark. He attended public and private schools in the New York area until 1947, when he moved to Indianapolis to live with a Jewish family and to be near his father. Mark said he truly became an American, not just a Jewish refugee, in Indianapolis. Joelson received a BA from Harvard in 1955 and a Harvard Law degree in 1958. He and Harvard Law colleagues would later establish the Appleseed Foundation, a nonprofit network of 16 centers across the U.S. and Mexico, to advance justice and guide centers for law in the public interest. After Harvard, Joelson was selected to the U.S. Justice Department's Honors Program in Washington DC to do appellate work. In 1961, he gained a one-year Fulbright scholarship at Oxford University in England, where he received a Diploma in Law. Joelson then worked for a series of private law firms in Washington DC: Arent, Fox, Plotkin, Kintner, and Kahn; Wald, Harkrader, and Ross; and Morgan Lewis. He practiced international and antitrust law, including for the Australian and British governments, and was awarded the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 2001. He published five editions of a pioneering international work called, "An International Antitrust Primer," the first edition in 1974 (with Earl Kintner) and the final edition published in 2019. The American Bar Association elected Joelson chairman of its international law section, and he served as the association's representative on the board of the International Bar Association. For many years he was on the roster of the American Arbitration Association, and he served on various international commissions. In his latter years, he was an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law Center and a private arbitration lawyer, and he wrote his memoirs entitled, "The Joelsons in the Twentieth Century." Joelson had a great love of baseball, opera, theatre, music and travel, and he was known for his wit, sense of humor, erudition and generosity. He is survived by his wife of 53 years, Anastasia Whelan Joelson; his children Helen, Daniel and Marisa; his grandchildren Valentina, Milena and Breezy; and his daughter-in-law Gina and her son Roco. Service private.