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.
Alexander Haim Pekelis was born in Odesa, Russia (now Ukraine), which at the time was part of the Russian Empire.
[1] 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.
His scholarly work from 1941 onwards dealt with the need for judicial action to be informed by social and economic realities; what he termed "A Jurisprudence of Welfare.
[4] He wrote, "Law is too serious a business to be left to lawyers… The greatness of the Supreme Court is manifested in its growing awareness that the issues which confront it, no matter how legal, must of necessity find a composition social, economic or political in nature.
"[3][5] Pekelis co-authored an Amicus brief for The American Jewish Congress in the Ninth Circuit case, Mendez v. Westminster School District.
In the brief, Pekelis argued that classifications that segregated Mexican children according to race, are based on "discriminatory social or legal notions of ‘inferiority’ or ‘superiority’’’ and therefore unconstitutional.
"The federal judiciary, led by the Supreme Court," Alexander Pekelis wrote in the early 1940s, "may very well prove to be, in the coming decade, the most liberal of the three branches of the national government.