The Sir Leon Radzinowicz Papers consists of materials created or collected by Radzinowicz from the time he immigrated to the United Kingdom in 1938 until just before his death in 1999. It principally reflects his work as a criminologist during the period and his extensive work as a legal scholar and author.

Sir Leon Radzinowicz was born in Lodz, Poland in 1906. He earned a law degree at the Law School and Institute of Criminology in Rome in 1928, and later earned a doctorate from the University of Cracow and did postdoctoral work in Belgium. He went to the University of Cambridge in England in 1938 on behalf of the Polish Ministry of Justice to study the English penal system. Radzinowicz joined the faculty at Cambridge in 1939, and established a department of criminal science in 1941. He was the founder and first Director (1959-1972) of the Cambridge University Institute of Criminology.

For more information about the manuscript collection, please see its finding aid.