He completed his secondary school in Białystok and then his legal studies at the Jan Kazimierz University of Lviv. He also studied in Germany, France, and Italy. Towards the end of the 1920’s he was the secretary in the Court of Appeal in Warsaw, and in 1930 he was appointed the sub-prosecutor of the District Court in Breżany. In 1934 he was moved to the Bar and pursued his profession in Warsaw. He also increased his knowledge of law at the seminar run by Professor Wacław Makowski and at the Free Polish University in Warsaw (with a branch in Łódź) under the supervision of Professor Stanisław Rappaport. In 1933 he took part in the League of Nations Conference on International Criminal Law in Madrid, where he made a presentation on ‘The Crime of Barbarity’ as a crime against international law. In 1937 he was a member of the Polish delegation to the 4th Congress on Criminal Law in Paris, where he also presented a paper entitled Defending Peace through Criminal Law. During the Second World War Lemkin took part in the defence of Warsaw, and in 1940 he managed to get through Lithuania to Sweden and then to the United States. In 1944 Lamkin’s principal work was published, namely Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress, in which he introduced his term and notion of ‘genocide’. The book won international acclaim and became the basis for the indictment in the subsequent Nuremberg Trials. In 1946 Lemkin became an advisor of R.H. Jackson, a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, and American chief prosecutor in the Nuremberg Trials. From 1948 he was the professor on international law at the Yale University, and from 1955 also at the Rutgers Law School. In 1951 and 1952 he was recommended for the Nobel Peace Prize. In September 1955 he received the Cross of the Order of Merit for the Federal Republic of Germany. He died suddenly of a heart attack in New York. His publications include Prawo karne skarbowe (1938), and La réglementation des paiements internationaux (1939).
