Founder of Soviet international law theory who conceptualized a distinct international law for the transitional period
Instead of dismissing international law as a bourgeois relic, he formalized a 'transitional' international law between systems — what Hans Kelsen called the 'insoluble conflict within the Soviet theory of international law.'
Founder of Soviet international law theory. His 1924 International Law of the Transitional Period conceptualized a distinct international law governing relations between capitalist and socialist systems. A pioneer of space law, he survived the Stalin purges to lay the institutional foundations of Soviet international legal scholarship.
Career Timeline
- 1915Graduated from the Law Faculty of Moscow University
- 1918–1927Secretary of the Central Committee of the Russian Red Cross Society; head of its foreign department
- 1923Professor at Moscow State University
- 1924Published International Law of the Transitional Period — laid the foundations of Soviet international law theory
- 1938Awarded Doctor of Juridical Sciences degree
- 1945–1946Expert of the Soviet delegation to the UN Preparatory Commission; consultant at London and Paris CFM sessions
- 1946Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences
- 1948–1952Director, Institute of Law of the USSR Academy of Sciences
- 1957Member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague
- 1959Chairman, Commission on Legal Questions of Interplanetary Space, USSR Academy of Sciences
- 1960–1964Head of the Department of International Law, Law Faculty, Moscow State University
Pioneer of Space Law
Korovin is recognized as one of the earliest scholars to lay the theoretical foundations of space law, notably through his 1934 article "La conquête de la stratosphère et le droit international" (The Conquest of the Stratosphere and International Law), published in the French journal Revue Générale de Droit International Public. This article was among the first to examine, from a jurisprudential standpoint, how the international legal order would need to adapt as aircraft ascended beyond the atmosphere. Rejecting the notion that state sovereignty extends indefinitely upward, Korovin argued that outer space beyond the atmosphere should be treated as the common domain of humanity.
In 1959 he was appointed the first chairman of the Commission on Legal Questions of Interplanetary Space of the USSR Academy of Sciences, building the institutional foundations of Soviet space law research. Through this body he systematized legal problems that were then without precedent (crewed spaceflight, orbital rights, and the demilitarization of space) and as editor-in-chief published the Soviet Union's first collections of space-law scholarship: Cosmos and International Law (1962) and Contemporary Problems of Space Law (1963).
At the 1958 session of the International Hugo Grotius Foundation in Munich, Korovin was awarded the Grotius Medal for his contributions to the establishment of interplanetary space law. Of his approximately 230 publications, a substantial share was devoted to space law, and his theoretical work is recognized as an intellectual forerunner of the international space law regime that culminated in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.