Leo Gross

Who is Leo Gross?

Leo Gross was an Austrian - American lawyer of Jewish descent. He was a scholar in the area of international law and international relations and from 1944 to 1980 a professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University.

Gross was born in 1903 in the town of Krosno in Galicia, then in Austria-Hungary, and graduated from the University of Vienna to study political science, international law and economy. He pursued his doctoral studies under Hans Kelsen until 1927. From 1929 to 1931, with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, he studied in the field of law and legal philosophy at the London School of Economics, at Columbia University and at Harvard University, where he was awarded a doctorate in the field of law in 1931. He then returned to Europe and worked as a research assistant to Kelsen at the University of Cologne.

After the seizure of power by the National Socialists, Kelsen was suspended from his professorship in Cologne because of his Jewish ancestry and emigrated to Switzerland in April 1933. On Kelsen's recommendation Gross then worked again at the LSE where he worked as an assistant to Hersch Lauterpacht.