Hans Gross (redirected from Hans Groß)

Gross, Hans 

Born Dec. 16, 1847, in Graz; died there Dec. 9, 1915. Austrian criminologist.

Gross was a professor of criminal law at the University of Czernowitz from 1897 to 1902; he held the same position at the University of Prague from 1902 to 1905 and, beginning in 1905, at the University of Graz. He was one of the founders of criminology and one of the fathers of criminal psychology; his Criminal Psychology (1898) was the first major work on the subject. He established the world’s first museum of criminology at Graz. His chief work was the Manual for Investigators as a System of Criminal Law (1893; Russian translations, 1895–96, 1908, 1930). Gross founded the journal Archiv für Kriminalanthropologie und Kriminalistik (Archives for Criminal Anthropology and Criminal Law); from 1898 to 1915 he was its editor in chief. He was the author of works that demonstrated the importance of applying the data of the natural and exact sciences to the problems of crime detection and criminal identification.