Two of the most prominent and influential international lawyers of the 20th century both studied law at Jan Kazimierz University in the Galician capital, called Lemberg during the Habsburg era and Lwów in interwar Poland. Both were former Jewish activists who in their professional careers focused on crimes against humanity and, in particular, the Holocaust, and both played an important role in Nuremberg in 1945 and 1946. Although the two of them do not seem to have gotten along, their common ‘Galician’ imprint is obvious. And while Lauterpacht had more professional success during his lifetime than Lemkin, the latter gained global prominence posthumously as ‘father’ of the term ‘genocide’.
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