Hans Julius Wolff (legal historian)

Hans Julius Wolff (born August 27, 1902 in Berlin ; † August 23, 1983 in Freiburg im Breisgau ) was an important German legal historian who researched in particular the law of ancient Greece .

Life

Wolff came from a Jewish family of scholars. He studied Ancient History , Philology and Law at the Universities of Berlin and Rostock and worked on the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae . After receiving his doctorate in 1932 ( to the position of women in classical Roman Dotalrecht ) he was briefly employed as acting judge, after the seizure of the Nazis but was dismissed for racial reasons and could not continue an academic career. From October 1, 1930 to November 30, 1931 and from May 1, 1933 to August 31, 1935, he worked for the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae in Munich. In 1935 he emigrated to Panama through the mediation of the “ Notgemeinschaft deutscher Wissenschaft im Auslands ” , where he taught at the National University until the end of the 1930s. In 1939 he emigrated to the USA; There he completed a complementary degree at the universities in Tennessee and Michigan and taught from 1945 at various universities in the Midwest , since 1950 at the University of Oklahoma . After returning to Germany in 1952, Wolff taught Roman law first in Mainz and from 1955 as a full professor of Greek, Roman and civil law in Freiburg . There he founded the office for ancient Greek law. His research focus was on ancient Attic law and on the law of the Ptolemaic period, evident from Greek papyri in Egypt.

Wolff was academically influenced primarily by the work of Ludwig Mitteis , with whom he came into contact through Joseph Partsch and Ernst Rabel . In 1972 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Athens . 1974/75 he was a member of the School of Historical Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton . Since 1963 he was a corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and since 1967 a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and the Göttingen Academy of Sciences .

Wolff converted from the Jewish to the Protestant and later to the Catholic faith. His estate is in the Jewish Museum Frankfurt .

Fonts (selection)

• Marriage law and family organization in ancient Athens 1944
• The origin of judicial litigation among the Greeks 1946
• Roman Law. A historical Introduction , Oklahoma 1951, (Reprinted 1976, ISBN 978-0806112961 )
• The judicial system of the Ptolemies , Beck, Munich 1962 (Munich contributions to papyrus research and ancient legal history, no. 44) [2. Edition 1970, ISBN 3-406-00644-2 ]
• Contributions to the legal history of ancient Greece and Hellenistic-Roman Egypt 1961
• The judiciary of the Ptolemies 1962, 2nd A. 1970
• The Attic Paragraphs. A contribution to the problem of loosening archaic forms of process , Böhlau, Weimar 1966 (Graezistische Abhandlungen, Vol. 2)
• Demosthenes as a lawyer. Functions and methods of litigation practitioners in classical Athens de Gruyter, Berlin 1968 (series of publications by the Legal Society eV, Berlin, no. 30)
• Control of norms and the concept of law in Attic democracy 1970
• The Significance of Epigraphy for Greek Legal History 1973
• The Law of the Greek Papyri of Egypt in the Ptolemaic and Principal Period Vol. 2: Organization and control of private legal transactions , Beck, Munich 1978, ISBN 3-406-05192-8 , ( Handbuch der Altertumswwissenschaft , part 5 ISBN 978-3406051920 )

literature

• Dietrich V. Simon: Hans Julius Wolff †. In: Gnomon . Volume 59, 1987, pp. 83 f. (Obituary).
• Dietfried Krömer , Manfred Flieger (ed.): Thesaurus stories. Contributions to a Historia Thesauri linguae Latinae by Theodor Bögel (1876–1973). Teubner, Stuttgart / Leipzig 1996, ISBN 3-8154-7101-X , p. 205.
• Gabor Hamza: Wolff, Hans Julius: The problem of the competition of legal systems in antiquity. Meeting reports of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, Philosophical-Historical Class. Born 1979-5. Treatise. Heidelberg, 1979. Állam- és Jogtudomány 23 (1980) pp. 779-781.
• Gabor Hamza (Ed.) Symposium. One hundred years of the Civil Code. Development of private law in the German and Central Eastern European language areas since the BGB came into force. 13-14 October 2000, Budapest. Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem, Budapest, 2006. p. 131.
• Gabor Hamza (Hrsg.) AB Schwarz: The German civil code and the national socialism. In: Symposium. One hundred years of the Civil Code. Development of private law in the German and Central Eastern European language areas since the BGB came into force. 13-14 October 2000, Budapest. Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem, Budapest, 2006. pp. 47–57.
• Heinrich Schlange-Schöningen : Wolff, Hans Julius. In: Peter Kuhlmann , Helmuth Schneider (Hrsg.): History of the ancient sciences. Biographical Lexicon (= The New Pauly . Supplements. Volume 6). Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02033-8 , Sp. 1334-1336.
• Joachim Hengstl (Ed.): Greek papyri from Egypt as evidence of public and private life. Our dear teacher Prof. Dr. jur Dr. hc Hans Julius Wolff on his 75th birthday. Heimeran, Munich 1978, ISBN 3-7765-2181-3 .
• Dieter Nörr : Hans Julius Wolff August 27, 1902 to August 23, 1983. In: Bavarian Academy of Sciences , Yearbook 1984, Munich 1984, pp. 227–231.

Web links

• Literature by and about Hans Julius Wolff in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Family tree obituary for his father Bruno Wolff (PDF; 1.2 MB)
2. ^ Ernst C. Stiefel , Frank Mecklenburg: German Jurists in American Exile (1933-1950). 1991, p. 55.
3. ↑ Reinhard Zimmermann : Today's Law, Roman Law and Today's Roman Law . In: Reinhard Zimmermann u. a. (Ed.): Legal history and private law dogmatics. CF Müller, Heidelberg 1999, pp. 1-39 (23).
4. ^ Hans Julius Wolff in the membership directory of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences
5. ↑ Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 264.
6. ^ Estate of Hans Julius Wolff at the Jewish Museum Frankfurt