Tracing the footsteps of a Prussian Germanist and legal historian
Volume 351 of Studies in European Legal History now published
Among contemporaries, he was considered to be one of the most distinguished legal scholars and well-respected legal historians, yet today his name is all but forgotten: Ernst Heymann. Raised and educated in the Prussian empire, in 1914 Heymann received a call as professor for German Law, Commercial Law and Canon Law at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-University in Berlin, where he also succeeded Heinrich Brunner to the most prestigious chair of Legal History in the Germanist tradition. Further high-level positions were to follow: Geheimer Justizrat, presidial Sekretar of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, and member of the directorate of the “Monumenta Germaniae Historica“.
In 1937, Heymann took over as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Comparative and International Private Law when the Nazis forced founding director Ernst Rabel to resign; he held that position until his death in 1946. On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of that institute, Reinhard Zimmermann, former director at the successor institute, the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg, offers an account of Ernst Heymann’s academic and personal trajectory. This vivid portrait traces the life, work and influence of a man highly esteemed by his contemporaries who held numerous influential positions in the system of science and academia during the German empire, the Weimar Republic – and also the National Socialist era.
This book is also immediately available via Open Access: