Alexander Haim Pekelis  Alexander Haim Pekelis (April 1902 – December 28, 1946) was a jurist, scholar and activist. He lived and was educated throughout Europe in his early life and was a jurist in pre-fascist Italy before moving to France in 1938 and to the United States in 1941. He became the first foreign-born Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia Law Review. Despite his short time in the United States before his untimely death in 1946 at the age of 44, he left his mark on modern United States jurisprudence, his work advocating and foretelling the role social sciences would come to play in deciding legal issues. Pekelis died in a plane crash in Ireland, at age 44. After his death, his scholarly works and theories were discussed by the Karl E. Meyer, Max Ascoli and Milton R. Konvitz among others. Alexander Haim Pekelis was born in Odessa, Russia (now Ukraine), which at the time was part of the Russian Empire. He graduated from Odessa Gymnasium in 1919, before fleeing from Russia in 1920 at the time of the Russian Revolution. He moved to Leipzig, Germany where he studied for a year before moving to Vienna, Austria until 1924. After living in Vienna for 3 years he immigrated to Florence, Italy where he studied law. He was educated at the University of Florence, where he graduated with a law degree in 1928. An ardent anti-fascist, Pekelis spent a year studying at the London School of Economics in 1929 through a fellowship award, ironically, from the fascist Ministry of Education of Italy. Two years after his graduation from the University of Florence, his graduate thesis was published under the Italian title "ll diritto come volontà costante", ("The Law as a Constant Will"). In 1932, he lectured on Jurisprudence at the University of Florence. Pekelis did not become a professor at the University, however, because the local Fascist party prevented him from doing so, since he had refused to join the party. However, he became a Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Rome in 1935. The Italian Racial Laws, which were first introduced in 1938, prohibited foreign born Jews from practicing law, medicine, and other professions in Italy. Because of this and the general growing antisemitism, Pekelis and his family left Italy. He moved to Paris where he practiced law until 1940. When the Germans invaded France, he fled with his young family (his wife, 3 young daughters, and two grandmothers), traveling through Vichy France, Spain and Portugal finally arriving in the United States as a refugee in 1941.