Karl Wilhelm Paetz

Karl Wilhelm Paetz (born June 11, 1781 in Ilfeld ; † March 27, 1807 ) was a German lawyer .

Life

Karl Wilhelm Paetz received an excellent humanistic education at the grammar school in Ilfeld under the guidance of his father Heinrich Alexander Günther Paetz, who was the director of the school. He showed great aptitude for studying, but his physical weakness occasionally hindered him. In early 1798 he moved to at the age of almost 17 years, University of Goettingen , of his father befriended around there led Christian Gottlob Heyne the law to study. His rapid progress in education and his amiable personality earned him the affection of professors; so Hugo was especially proud that he was his pupil. In 1801 Paetz won the prize for a task set by the Göttingen Faculty of Law with an academic treatise that he wrote about it. He followed in the footsteps of his older brother Ludwig August, who had been awarded the prize two years earlier by the theological faculty in Göttingen.

Soon afterwards, Paetz used his writing, which was published by Dieterich in Göttingen, as an inaugural dissertation and thus obtained the doctorate degree as well as admission to the private lecturers and assessors of the Göttingen Spruchkollegium. In the following winter semester he gave lectures on feudal law and German particular history. He was so successful in doing this that he was appointed full professor of law in Kiel this winter . Before he went there, he made a trip to Wetzlar , the seat of the Reich Chamber Court, as was customary at the time , whereupon he took up his professorship in Kiel in the winter of 1802. Here, too, he distinguished himself in such a way that he received a call to Heidelberg in 1804 , at whose university he was offered the chair of constitutional and feudal law as well as imperial history. After difficult negotiations, which mainly revolved around better conditions, Paetz accepted in the autumn of 1804. In Heidelberg, however, he only taught for one year and returned to Göttingen in the autumn of 1805 to teach German law and German history . He also combined practical exercises based on the example of Pütters ; he also began to read about feudal and criminal law .

The Göttingen professorship that Paetz took on with the program De vera librorum juris feudalis longobardici origine (Göttingen 1805), a short occasional publication on Lombard feudal law, was to last only one and a half years. He died on March 27, 1807, at the age of only 26, after having been sick for a year. He left his textbook on feudal law , the only major work of his, unfinished. It was completed in the summer of 1807 by Christian August Gottlieb Göde, who was only 38 years old. Immediately after the death of his pupil and friend Paetz, Heyne complained about his death in a letter to Heeren , who was also one of the deceased's close friends.

literature

• Karl Friedrich Dieck : Paetz (Karl Wilhelm) , in: Johann Samuelansch , Johann Gottfried Gruber : (Hrsg.): Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste , 3rd section, 9th part (1837), p. 243 f.