(Philip) Quincy Wright

Legal scholar, born in Medford, Massachusetts, USA. He studied at Lombard College (1912) and the University of Illinois (1915 PhD), and taught at Harvard (1916–19), the University of Minnesota (1919–23), and the University of Chicago (1923–56). He was an adviser to the US State Department (1943–5) and to the Nuremberg Tribunal (1945). Among his books are The Enforcement of International Law through Municipal Law in the US (1916), The Causes of War and the Conditions of Peace (1935), and The Role of International Law in the Prevention of War (1961).

At that time, the horrors of the World War I were foremost in thoughts of many social scientists and soon after his arrival, Quincy Wright started to organize an interdisciplinary study of wars. Quincy Wright summarized this research in his magnum opus A Study of War. Karl Deutsch of the Harvard University remembers Quincy Wright as follows:

War, to be abolished, must be understood. No one man worked with more sustained care, compassion, and level-headedness on the study of war, its causes, and its possible prevention than Quincy Wright. and in his great book, A Study of War, he gathered, together with his collaborators, a larger body of relevant facts, insights, and far-ranging questions about war than anyone else has done.

Quincy Wright study of warfare inspired many social scientists and his database of wars is an indispensable resource for anyone seriously interested in quantitiative studies of human conflicts.

His brothers were the geneticist Sewall Wright and the aeronautical engineer Theodore Paul Wright.