Carl Creifelds

Carl Creifelds (born April 3, 1907 in Cologne , † April 22, 1994 in Munich ) was a German lawyer . He is the founder of the most famous legal dictionary, the Creifeld named after him .

Life

Carl Creifelds was born in Cologne in 1907. After completing his studies and taking the first state examination in law, he did his doctorate on a criminal law topic. After his 2nd state examination in 1932, he became a court assessor at the Cologne Public Prosecutor's Office . A few years later he was given the opportunity to work in the criminal law department of the Reich Ministry of Justice on the planned reform of the law of criminal procedure and was promoted to the chamber judge in this position in 1941 . After the end of the war he worked in the private sector from 1949 to 1952 in the Berlin Senate Department for National Education, then, initially as a government director, from 1954 as Senate Councilor, head of the criminal law department in the Senate Department for Justice.

In 1963 there was a break in his professional career. The judges' selection committee of the Federal Court of Justice had elected Creifelds as federal judge; due to concerns about his work in the Reich Ministry of Justice, Creifelds was not appointed by the then Federal President Heinrich Lübke . He did not complain, but drew an unusual personal conclusion from it and retired at the age of 56.

A short time later he came into contact with the Munich publishing house CH Beck , which at the time still had a branch in Berlin. At the suggestion of the junior publisher Hans Dieter Beck , he became the author and coordinator, later also the editor of the Creifeld (legal dictionary) first published in 1968 and named after him , a legal dictionary that is still published under his name and himself to this day (last in the 22nd edition in 2017) with a total of around 1,600 pages, has acquired a great reputation as a sophisticated reference work. Creifelds worked as an editor and author until the 9th edition in 1988, but then gradually gave up his involvement in younger hands. In addition to this work, which is aimed primarily at lawyers and a compressed explanation of all the important terms from legislation provides and legal practice, he took only from the 7th edition in 1966 and the processing of by Otto Model justified before the war citizen-paperback and supervised this up to the 21st edition (the work is now in its 34th edition in 2018).

In addition to these activities as a specialist author and publisher, Creifelds worked for many years as a specialist book editor in the Munich publishing house, well beyond the normal retirement age. At the end of the 1960s he was responsible for a new series of legal paperbacks as an editor , which CH Beck brought out as a licensed edition in the German paperback publishing house. The purpose of these volumes was to make legal issues understandable for a wide audience. From the series originally called “Beck Legal Books for Everyone”, the “Beck Legal Advisors in dtv”, which are still available in more than 100 volumes, emerged.

Carl Creifelds, who had his own office in the publishing house until a few years before his death , died on April 22, 1994 in Munich.

literature

• Hans Dieter Beck: Carl Creifelds. In: A portrait of lawyers. Publisher and authors in 4 decades. Verlag CH Beck, Munich 1988. pp. 93-97. ISBN 3406331963

Web links

• Literature by and about Carl Creifeld in the catalog of the German National Library