Karl Eduard Morstadt

Karl Eduard Morstadt (born April 7, 1792 in Karlsruhe ; † January 10, 1850 ) was a German legal scholar , economist and professor at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg .

life and work

Morstadt was the son of the late Grand Duke of Baden Hoffouriers George Michael Morstadt and his wife Friederike Jacobine. In 1809 he began studying law at the University of Heidelberg , which he passed in 1812 with the legal candidate exam. In the same year in Freiburg im Breisgau he obtained a disputation on the question utrum iudex ex officio teneatur, omissem a reo praescriptionis exceptionem supplere? the legal doctorate. He then worked as a lawyer in Karlsruhe.

In 1815, Morstadt sent a letter to the university senate with the request that he be employed as a private lecturer. This was granted to him under the condition of the habilitation in Heidelberg. Morstadt did not comply with this requirement, however, and it was ultimately waived because the doctorate at the University of Freiburg, also in Baden, was considered sufficient. With his refusal, however, Morstadt had created his first internal university opponents. In 1819 he married Wilhelmine Magdalene Piton. In the same year he was appointed associate professor in Heidelberg. Numerous attempts to obtain an ordinariate, however, failed due to resistance from the faculty. Morstadt had acquired their aversion through abusive and insulting statements in his lectures and writings about deserving colleagues such as Carl Joseph Anton Mittermaier and Robert von Mohl . In one lecture he is supposed to read a book by Mittermaier with the words “I throw the same thing on the wall; what is good about it sticks. ”on the wall; He is said to have spat on another book. In his memoirs, Mohl describes him as a half-fool, a paragon of meanness and an Asot devoted to drinking . Probably precisely because of his polemics, Morstadt's lectures, which he held mainly on civil procedural law, were very well attended by the students. In 1823 he was given a teaching position in economics in an attempt to appease him. However, he made use of this only very sporadically, as he had not achieved his main goal, the ordinariate.

A petition from 1833 to obtain a full professorial office for constitutional law and Baden land law, whose representation at the faculty was “desolate”, was also rejected because of an extremely negative opinion from his professor colleagues. After another serious insult to the dean Mittermaier in a paper published in 1847, he asked - presumably to forestall an impending suspension - "on medical advice" for release. This request was immediately complied with.

Morstadt's work largely corresponds to his tendency to criticize others. There are a few of his own writings on civil procedural law, but mainly he limited himself to denigrating the works of his colleagues that had just appeared. Nonetheless, with his criticism of Feuerbach's textbook , he succeeded in producing a work that was also professionally appreciated by his opponents.

Fonts

• Dissertatio juridica qua disauiritur num Germanoru jureconsulti novo legum civilium codici condendo idonei sint censendi? Engelmann, Heidelberg 1815. (Dissertation)
• Material criticism of Martin's civil process textbook Groos, Heidelberg 1820. (Second edition 1828)
• Community German civil process key, pragmatic-critical commentary on Linde's civil process textbook Heidelberg 1847.
• Notes from the Baden lawyer exam , Heidelberg 1847
• Polemical and humorous flares in German private princely law or humorous fight against Heffter’s (sic!) Heresy about marriage of conscience, secret marriage and cloak child inheritance law , Heidelberg 1847
• Detailed commentary on Feuerbach's textbook on the common embarrassing law Hurter, Schaffhausen 1855.

literature

• Klaus-Peter Schroeder : "A university for and by lawyers" - The Heidelberg Law Faculty in the 19th and 20th centuries . Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2010, ISBN 978-3-428-12053-6 , p. 150-156 .
• Wilfried Küper (Ed.): Heidelberg teacher of criminal law in the 19th and 20th centuries . Decker, Heidelberg 1998, ISBN 978-3-8226-1085-5 , pp. 117-144 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Schroeder, p. 150f.
2. ^ Robert von Mohl, Memoirs I , Stuttgart 1902.
3. ↑ quoted from Schroeder, p. 153.