Otto Opet

Otto Opet (born April 1, 1866 in Berlin ; died November 17, 1941 in Hamburg ) was a German legal scholar ( civil law ).

Life

Opet was a German judge and legal scholar who focused on legal history , theater law, copyright law and family law.

In 1889 he was after the completion of legal studies at the University of Berlin with a thesis "to the inheritance status of women in the time of people's rights" to Dr. iur. PhD. At the end of 1891 he passed the assessor examination and became a court assessor in the district of the Berlin Court of Appeal .

After he had not been given the opportunity to do his habilitation in Germany - Cohn implies that this was due to an aversion to the then influential legal historian Heinrich Brunner - Opet applied as a private lecturer in Bern in 1893 . This request was granted, so that Opet read legal history, copyright and patent law there - unpaid up to and including 1895 . After Opet had published his main work “German Theater Law” in 1897, he tried again to find his own chair in Bern and Graz , but this was unsuccessful. Thus, in 1900 he switched to a private lecturer at the University of Kiel , where he gave lectures that were popular and well attended by students ( Cohn ). There he also met Gustav Radbruch , who - like Opet - was a social democrat . To earn a living, Opet continued to work as a judge. Perhaps because of his Jewish origins ( Cohn ), he was always refused appointment as full professor despite repeated requests. It was not until 1920 that he was appointed unpaid associate professor in Kiel.

Not until 1930, following a ruling by the Reichsgericht, he became a full professor (German law) and in 1931/1932 dean of the law faculty. In 1933, the Kiel student body massively demanded that he be recalled because of his Jewish descent. Opet was also a member of the Reichsbanner , the League for Human Rights and the Republican Club . His ancestry cost Opet under the National Socialist rule in 1933 also his position as co-editor of the 1928 a. a. Archive for Copyright, Film and Theater Law (UFITA) founded by Paul Tuesday , which has been one of the most important bodies of copyright science in Germany from the start. In 1935 he was one of the signatories of the foreword in the first issue of the journal Intellectual Property , which was founded on Tuesday in the migration, but in which he subsequently hardly appeared.

Opet retired under pressure from continued defamation in April 1933 at the age of 67. In November 1933 he was dismissed from civil service. A complaint against it was ineffective.

Opet died in Hamburg during the Second World War .

Works (selection)

• Inheritance position of women in the time of popular rights , 1888
• German theater law , 1897
• The family law of the German Civil Code , 1899
• Commentary on marriage law in the so-called Big Commentary on the Civil Code , 1906 (first 1904)
• To buy a bride according to old Alemannic law , 1907
• Bridal tradition and consensus talks in the Middle Ages , 1910
• Wedding rituals , 1910
• Protection of National Minorities , 1919

literature

• Simon Apel: Otto Opet (1866-1941) . In: Simon Apel, Louis Pahlow , Matthias Wießner (eds.): Biographisches Handbuch des Intellectual Property , Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2017, pp. 208–212.
• Ernst J. Cohn: The Opet Case. A study on the life of the German pre-war university , in: Josef Tittel u. a. (Ed.), Multitudo Legum Ius Unum. Festschrift for Wilhelm Wengler on his 65th birthday, Volume II: Collision law and comparative law , Berlin 1973, pp. 211–234.
• Ernst J. Cohn: Three Jewish Lawyers of Germany , in: Year Book XVII of the Leo Baeck Institute , 1972, pp. 155–178 (169 ff.).
• Christian Hattenhauer :  Opet, Otto. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 19, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-428-00200-8 , pp. 547 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Manfred Rehbinder : Otto Opet on the social commitment of copyright law , in: Ulrich Loewenheim (Hrsg.), Copyright in the information age. Festschrift for Wilhelm Nordemann on his 70th birthday on January 8, 2004 , Munich 2004, pp. 87–93.
• Salomon Wininger : Great Jewish National Biography . Volume 4. Chernivtsi, 1927, p. 365

Web links

• Biographical note on the page about expelled scientists from the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel
• Literature by and about Otto Opet in the catalog of the German National Library