Abstract. The main objects of study in this article are two classes of Rankin-Selberg L-functions, namely Lðs; f  gÞ and Lðs; sym 2 ðgÞ Â sym 2 ðgÞÞ, where f; g are newforms, holomorphic or of Maass type, on the upper half plane, and sym 2 ðgÞ denotes the symmetric square lift of g to GLð3Þ. We prove that in general, i.e., when these L-functions are not divisible by L-functions of quadratic characters (such divisibility happening rarely), they do not admit any LandauSiegel zeros. Such zeros, which are real and close to s ¼ 1, are highly mysterious and are not expected to occur. There are corollaries of our result, one of them being a strong lower bound for special value at s ¼ 1, which is of interest both geometrically and analytically. One also gets this way a good bound on the norm of sym 2 ðgÞ.