LSU Law Dean Alena Allen presents the 2023-24 Adjunct Professor of the Year award to Professor Emeritus Alain Levasseur at the Class of 2024 Commencement on Saturday, May 18.
Since formally retiring in 2015, Professor Alain A. Levasseur has continued to teach one class each semester at LSU Law, where he joined the faculty 47 years ago. This year, the LSU Law student body voted Levasseur the Adjunct Professor of the Year.
“I do what I do because I love it,” he said of his teaching and scholarship in 2020, when the University of Bucharest presented him with an honorary doctorate—the third of his career. “What pleases me the most about the honorary degrees is that they help put LSU Law on the forefront of comparative law, which has been my goal since I became a faculty member here in 1977.”
Born in Spain—where his father was Consul General of France—and raised in France, Morocco, Brazil, and Canada, Levasseur earned a DESS from the University of Paris Law School in 1965 and an M.C.L. from Tulane University in 1966. He returned to Tulane University two years later to teach.
In 1969, he was an associate with the Paris firm of Mudge, Rose, Guthrie & Alexander but left to become a technical assistant at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. In the fall of 1970, he resumed teaching at Tulane until 1977, at which point he transferred to LSU Law.
“Not to toot my own horn, but I helped put the Center of Civil Law Studies at LSU Law on the map, and it’s now recognized by many universities around the world,” said Levasseur. “I’m proud that LSU Law is considered one of the great law schools among civil law jurisdictions around the world.”
Throughout his career, Levasseur has been awarded three honorary doctorates: first, in 1998, from the Université d’Aix Marseille Paul Cézanne; then in 2010, from the Université de Paris Panthéon Assas; and finally, in 2020, from the University of Bucharest.
He has published more than 30 books in English and French, most of them on comparative law topics. Among them is the Dictionary of the Civil Code, published by LexisNexis in France in 2014, which includes some 11,000 entries in French that were translated into English.
