James Goldschmidt

James Paul Goldschmidt (born December 17, 1874 in Berlin , † June 28, 1940 in Montevideo ) was a German legal scholar. Because of his Jewish origins, he lost his post as a university lecturer after the National Socialists came to power and had to emigrate from Germany.

Life

Goldschmidt studied law at the University of Heidelberg and the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin , today's Humboldt University. In 1895 he passed the First State Examination and received his doctorate in the same year with a thesis on The Doctrine of the Unfinished and Finished Attempt . After the traineeship, the assessor exam followed in 1900. In 1901 Goldschmidt completed his habilitation at the University of Berlin. The habilitation thesis was entitled Administrative Criminal Law . She was looked after by Josef Kohler and Franz von Liszt . Goldschmidt only became an associate professor in Berlin eight years later. Another ten years passed before Goldschmidt was promoted to full professor at the University of Berlin in 1919. In the same year Goldschmidt was appointed employee in the Reich Ministry of Justice in the reform of the criminal process.

After the National Socialist " seizure of power " Goldschmidt was the first professor at the Berlin law faculty to be prevented from continuing his teaching activity. In 1934 - after a brief transfer to the University of Frankfurt a. M. - forcibly retired. In the next few years he gave numerous lectures in Spain and published in Spanish, Italian and French. In doing so, he increasingly turned to topics of legal philosophy.

It was not until the end of 1938 that Goldschmidt and his wife were forced to leave Germany for good in view of the constantly intensifying persecution measures. Goldschmidt first emigrated to England. From there he traveled on to Uruguay. He died in Montevideo in 1940.

Family relationships

James Goldschmidt came from a Jewish family and was born in Berlin. His father Robert Goldschmidt was a banker. His younger brother Hans Walter Goldschmidt (1881–1940) was also a lawyer. He was a judge at the Cologne Higher Regional Court and an associate professor at the University of Cologne . During the time of National Socialism , Hans Walter Goldschmidt left Germany like his brother. He was killed on July 2, 1940 in a torpedo attack on the ship Arandora Star , which was supposed to bring him from England to Canada as an internee .

James Goldschmidt and his wife Margarete, b. Long, four children. Two of them, the sons Werner Goldschmidt (1910–1987) and Robert Goldschmidt (1907–1965), like their father, became professors in law. Werner Goldschmidt worked at various universities in Buenos Aires , Robert Goldschmidt taught at the University of Córdoba (Argentina) and in Venezuela . The youngest son Victor Goldschmidt (1914–1981) studied in France and taught philosophy and history as a professor at various French universities. Nothing is known about the fate of the daughter Ada Goldschmidt (* 1919).

Scientific importance

Goldschmidt made important scientific contributions to criminal law as well as civil and criminal procedural law. In his habilitation thesis The administrative criminal he sat down with the so-called transgressions (today mostly by misdemeanors replaced Bagatellstraftaten) apart, at that time still as a separate crime category in addition to crimes and offenses in the Penal Code were regulated. Goldschmidt tried to make a more sensible distinction between petty offenses and substantial offenses and advocated the assignment of the right of infringement to administrative law. In doing so, he anticipated future developments in the German criminal law system. Goldschmidt also worked on reform proposals for criminal law and criminal procedure law.

In the area of ​​criminal procedural law, he advocated the adoption of elements of Anglo-Saxon procedural law. He wanted to give the public prosecutor the role of a litigator and banish the remnants of the inquisition maxim from the German criminal trial.

Goldschmidt is likely to have achieved the greatest importance as a civil procedural lawyer. His monograph The Trial as a Legal Situation , published in 1925, was recognized by Rudolf Bruns as the “last great achievement in German constructive procedural law”. In this book, Goldschmidt developed the theory of “substantive civil justice law”, which was already well-founded in earlier publications, and advocated the existence of the citizen's right to legal protection against the state.

Goldschmidt's obituaries, which only appeared in Germany on the tenth anniversary of his death in 1950, praise his acuteness and erudition. Eberhard Schmidt speaks of Goldschmidt's "unusual acumen", the "originality of thoughts" and attests to him the "rare ability to drill into the deepest depths". The appreciation that his work enjoys is evidenced by the fact that several of his books were reprinted in the second half of the twentieth century. However, various acknowledgments highlight Goldschmidt's tendency to think in abstract terms. Wolfgang Sellert , for example, notes that Goldschmidt had a "pronounced predilection for conceptual legal constructions".

Goldschmidt still enjoys a particularly high reputation in Spain and Latin America. For Niceto Alcalá-Zamora y Castillo , Goldschmidt, who was expelled from Germany by the National Socialists, was an “ambassador and propagandist of German culture”. The Spanish law teacher Manuel Peláez del Rosal describes him as one of the greatest process scientists ("uno de los más grandes científicos del proceso").

Adolf Schönke (1908–1953), after the war professor of criminal and procedural law in Freiburg, and Friedrich Karl Kaul (1906–1981), a prominent lawyer from East Berlin who was also admitted to the Federal Republic during the Cold War, were in the early 1930s James Goldschmidt's assistant and student.

Fonts

• The doctrine of the unfinished and the finished attempt. Breslau 1897. Reprinted Frankfurt 1977.
• The process as a legal position. Berlin 1925. Reprinted Aalen 1986.
• The administrative criminal law. Berlin 1902. Reprinted Aalen 1962.
• Problemas generales del derecho. Buenos Aires 1944.

literature

• Rudolf Bruns: James Goldschmidt (December 17, 1874– June 18, 1940). A memorial sheet. In: Zeitschrift für Zivilproceedings. 88, 1975, pp. 122-127.
• Robert Goldschmidt: James Goldschmidt's last works. In: AcP. 151, 1950/1951, pp. 363-366.
• Ernst Heinitz: James Goldschmidt in memory. In: NJW. 1950, pp. 536f.
• Anna-Maria Countess von Lösch: The naked ghost. The law faculty of the Berlin University in upheaval in 1933 . Tübingen 1999, ISBN 3-16-147245-4
• Eberhard Schmidt: James Goldschmidt in memory. In: Süddeutsche Juristerneitung. 1950, col. 447f.
• Adolf Schönke: On the tenth anniversary of James Goldschmidt's death. In: German legal journal. 5, 1950, pp. 275f.
• Wolfgang Sellert: James Paul Goldschmidt (1874–1940). In: Helmut Heinrichs u. a. (Ed.): German lawyers of Jewish origin. Munich 1993, ISBN 3-406-36960-X , pp. 595-613.
• Gerhard Werle, Moritz Vormbaum: The criminal law at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität 1871-1945 , in: Heinz-Elmar Tenorth (ed.), Transformation der Wissensordnung , Berlin 2010, pp. 109–127, here: pp. 123–125 .

Web links

• Literature by and about James Goldschmidt in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by and about James Goldschmidt  in the German Digital Library
• Ulli Boldt: Life and Work of James Goldschmidt. 1991. Term paper, made using materials from the Humboldt University archive.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Salomon Winiger: Goldschmidt, James. In: Great Jewish National Biography. Volume 2. Cernăti 1927. Reprinted 1979, p. 457.
2. ↑ In detail: Anna-Maria Countess von Lösch: The naked spirit. The law faculty of the Berlin University in upheaval in 1933 (Contributions to the legal history of the 20th century, vol. 26). Tübingen 1999, p. 179ff.
3. Jump up ↑ Jack Beatson: Aliens, Enemy Aliens, and Friendly Enemy Aliens . In: Jack Beatson, Reinhard Zimmermann (Ed.): Jurists Uprooted . Oxford 2004, pp. 73-104, 100
4. ^ Rudolf Bruns: James Goldschmidt (12/17/1874–6/18/1940). A memorial sheet. In: Zeitschrift für Zivilproceedings. 88, 1975, p. 122.
5. ↑ Eberhard Schmidt: James Goldschmidt to the memory. In: Süddeutsche Juristerneitung. 1950, col. 447.
6. ^ Wolfgang Sellert: James Paul Goldschmidt (1874–1940) . In: Helmut Heinrichs u. a. (Ed.): German lawyers of Jewish origin . Munich 1993, p. 598.
7. ↑ Quoted from Adolf Schönke: On the tenth anniversary of James Goldschmidt's death. In: German legal journal. 5, 1950, pp. 275f.
8. ↑ Manuel Peláez del Rosal: Goldschmidt, James. ( Memento of the original from April 23, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Gran Enciclopedia Rialp. Madrid 1991. 
9. ↑ Anna-Maria Countess von Lösch: The naked spirit. The law faculty of the Berlin University in upheaval in 1933 . Tübingen 1999, p. 340ff.
10. ^ Annette Rosskopf: Criminal defense as an ideological offensive. The life of the lawyer Friedrich Karl Kaul (1906–1981). ( Memento of the original from March 11, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: forum historiae iuris. August 9, 1998.