Robert Lansing

Robert Lansing (1864 to 1928) was an American lawyer and diplomat, an authority on international law who served as the 42nd United States Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson from 1915 to 1920. Born in Watertown, New York, he graduated from Amherst College in 1886, was admitted to the bar in 1889 and practised with his father's firm until 1907. He served as counsel in a series of international arbitrations, among them the Bering Sea Arbitration, the Bering Sea Claims Commission, the Alaskan Boundary Tribunal of 1903 and the North Atlantic Fisheries arbitration at The Hague, and was agent of the United States in the American and British Arbitration of 1912 to 1914. Appointed counselor to the State Department in 1914, he succeeded William Jennings Bryan in 1915, negotiated the Lansing-Ishii Agreement with Japan in 1917 and sat on the American commission at the Paris peace conference. He was a founding member of the American Society of International Law and helped establish the American Journal of International Law.