Leo Gross

Leo Gross (April 6, 1903 in Krosno, Galicia - November 8, 1990 in Cambridge, Massachusetts) 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 (LSE), at Columbia University and at Harvard University, where he was awarded a doctorate in the field of law in 1931.

In 1941 he was employed in the US He was also an adviser to the U.S. State Department and the United Nations. His estate is located in the German Exile Archive in the German National Library at Frankfurt.

Awards and recognition

Gross served on the board of the American Society of International Law from 1956 until 1959. He was appointed honorary vice president in 1970, was awarded an ASIL Certificate of Merit in 1977 for his work The Future of the International Court of Justice, and received the ASIL's highest award, the Manley O. Hudson Medal, in 1986. Furthermore, in 1970 Gross became honorary publisher of the American Journal of International Law for which he had served as co-publisher from 1956 until 1970 and as book review editor from 1958 until 1985. He became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1958 and an honorary member of the Indian Society of International Law in 1964.