Francis Lieber

Francis Lieber, born Franz Lieber in Berlin in 1798 and died in 1872, was a German-born American jurist and political philosopher. A veteran of the Prussian Army who was wounded in the Waterloo campaign, he was persecuted in Prussia for his republican views, fought briefly in the Greek War of Independence, and emigrated to the United States in 1827. He edited the first editions of the Encyclopaedia Americana, taught at the University of South Carolina, and from 1857 held chairs at Columbia University, moving to Columbia Law School in 1865. He is best known as the author of the Lieber Code of 1863, the instructions that governed the conduct of the Union Army in the American Civil War and the first modern codification of the customary law and the laws of war, which later served as a basis for the Hague Conventions and the Geneva Conventions. He is also remembered as a pioneer of political science and sociology in the United States.