Raphael Lemkin papers

Raphael Lemkin was an attorney and professor of law who coined the term 'genocide' and was responsible for the United States genocide convention. He was born in Eastern Poland on 24 June 1901. He studied philology, mastered nine languages, served as Warsaw's public prosecutor, and practised and taught law until 1939, when the Nazi invasion forced him to flee to Sweden. In 1941 Lemkin emigrated to the USA on the invitation of the Duke University Law School and was later associated with the Yale Law School. During the 1940s and 1950s he devoted most of his energies to the crusade for the international adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was adopted by the UN  General Assembly in 1948. He continued to lobby for unanimous ratification. Although the United States failed to ratify the convention, it became international law in January 1951. Lemkin never married and died of a heart attack in 1959.