Georges Scelle

Georges Scelle lived from March 19, 1878, born in Avranches, to January 8, 1961, and was a French international jurist and a member of the United Nations International Law Commission. He attended the law faculty and the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques in Paris, where he won a prize for his thesis on the slave trade to the Indies of Castile, written under the supervision of Antoine Pillet. He was a professor at the law faculty of Dijon for twenty years, teaching public international law and industrial relations law, and from 1929 to 1933 was a professor at the Geneva Graduate Institute of International Studies. He published the first volume of his Precis de droit des gens shortly before joining the University of Paris in 1933, where he taught public international law until his retirement in 1948, and he exerted considerable influence on the generation that dominated French public service and academic law from the 1930s onward, whose students included Georges Berlia, Lazare Kopelmanas, Guy de Lacharriere, Georges Burdeau, Charles Rousseau and Rene-Jean Dupuy.