Alfred Verdross or Verdroß or Verdroß-Droßberg (until 1919, Edler von Droßberg; 22 February 1890 – 24 April 1980) was an Austrian international lawyer and judge at the European Court of Human Rights.

Together with Hans Kelsen, Adolf Merkl [de; pt] and Josef L. Kunz, he was one the main exponents of the Vienna school of legal theory.

Alfred Verdross was born on 22 February 1890 in Innsbruck as the son of the then lieutenant and later general of the Austro-Hungarian army, Ignaz Verdroß von Droßberg [de; it].

[9] In December 1920 he returned to Vienna, where he was employed in the International Law Department of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs until 1924, and from 1923 also as a professor at the Consular Academy.

[10][11] Austria moved decisively toward an autocratic fascist state when Chancellor Dollfuss began ruling by decree after the self- elimination of parliament in 1933.

Together with the law school deans of Graz and Innsbruck, he even lodged a formal protest against the breach of the constitution by the new authoritarian government.

[15][16][17][18] He agreed to join Dolfuss's Austrian nationalist party, the Fatherland Front, only on the condition that he would not renounce "the ultimate goal of the unification of all Germans", i.e., his pan-Germanist ideals.

[16] In 1933–1934 his assistant at the Consular Academy was Friedrich August Freiherr von der Heydte, at the time an SA member, whom he had recommended to Kelsen in Cologne.

[1] After the annexation he was temporarily suspended from his teaching assignments in the summer of 1938, but accommodated to political pressure[34] and, from 1939, thanks to the support of the Nazi rector of the university, the legal historian Ernst Schönbauer [de], and the intervention of General Jodl, he was allowed to resume the teaching of international law, after adapting the content of his lectures to the demands of the new rulers.

[37][38] He managed to come to terms with the Nazi government[1] and in 1942 was appointed alternate judge at the German Prize Court of Appeals (Oberprisenhof)[11][37] and director of the Institute of Legal Sciences at the university of Vienna.

[49] Alongside Adolf Merkl [de; pt] and Josef Laurenz Kunz, Verdross was one of Hans Kelsen's most important pupils and a leading exponent of the Vienna school of legal theory.

He also rejected the prevailing theory of the time, Triepel's "dualism", according to which international and national law constitute two separate legal systems, based on different grounds of validity and addressed to different subjects.

Instead, in line with the revival of the universalist approach to international law initiated by the Dutch scholar Hugo Krabbe and continued by Kelsen,[56][57] Verdross subscribed to "monism with primacy of international law", a position he already expounded in his 1923 book Die Einheit des rechtlichen Weltbildes ("The Unity of the Legal World-View").

[40][63][64] In a 1931 essay, Verdross explained that these fundamental principles originate from the legal consciousness of all modern civilised nations and are binding also upon states which have not consented to them.

[70] As early as 1923, he rejected Kelsen's moral relativism, turned away from of his mentor's neo-Kantianism and legal positivism, and fully embraced objective idealism, the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition of natural law, and the Wertphilosophie of Franz Brentano, Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann.

[77][78] According to Martti Koskenniemi, in filling the basic norm with natural law principles, "Verdross used the pure theory so as to turn what Kelsen saw as political choice into an article of faith in fundamental values.