Leopold Wenger

Leopold Wenger (born September 4, 1874 in Obervellach ; † September 21, 1953 there ) was an important legal historian . He combined legal with ancient philological and historical research. He is considered to be the initiator of a universal history of antiquity .

biography

Leopold Wenger was born at Trabuschgen Castle in Obervellach, which belonged to his maternal grandparents . He studied law at the University of Graz . Here he attended Gustav Hanausek's famous seminar . After receiving his doctorate in 1897, he continued his studies in Leipzig with Ludwig Mitteis . In 1901 he completed his habilitation at the University of Graz for Roman Law .

In 1902 he became an associate professor in Graz. From 1904 he taught at the universities of Vienna , Graz , Heidelberg and Munich , where he founded the seminar for papyrus research. In 1914 he was elected a full member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences , and in 1926 a corresponding member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences . In 1935 he followed a call back to the University of Vienna, where he retired three years later . From 1950 to 1953 he was co-editor of the real dictionary for antiquity and Christianity .

Wenger's students from his time in Graz include Paul Koschaker , Mariano San Nicolò and Artur Steinwenter .

In 1956, in recognition of his academic merits, the legal history chairs of the Law Faculty of the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich were combined under the name Leopold Wenger Institute for Legal History and Papyrus Research . Wenger's extensive library formed the basis of the equipment.

Awards

• 1947 Prize of the City of Vienna for the humanities
• 1947 honorary doctorate from the University of Vienna

Works

• On the doctrine of the actio iudicati . 1901, habilitation thesis
• Roman and Ancient Legal History . 1905
• Byzantine papyri . 1914
• Institutions of Roman civil procedural law . 1925
• The sources of Roman law . 1953

literature

• Fritz Fellner , Doris A. Corradini (Ed.): Austrian History in the 20th Century. A biographical-bibliographical lexicon (= publications of the Commission for Modern History of Austria. Vol. 99). Böhlau, Vienna et al. 2006, ISBN 3-205-77476-0 , p. 448 f.
• Evelyn Höbenreich : Ludwig Mitteis and Leopold Wenger. In: Journal of the Savigny Foundation for Legal History, Rome. Abt. 109 (1992), p. 547 ff.
• Evelyn Höbenreich: The "King's Thought ". In the S. (Ed.): Memory of the 50th year of death of Leopold Wenger (= meeting reports of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, phil.-hist. Class 741. Bd.). Vienna 2006, p. 17 ff.
• Gerhard Thür : Leopold Wenger: A life for ancient legal history. In the S. (Ed.): Memory of the 50th year of death of Leopold Wenger (= meeting reports of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, phil.-hist. Class 741. Bd.). Vienna 2006, p. 1 ff.
• Leopold Wenger: autobiography. In: Austrian history of the present in self-portrayals. I (1950), p. 133 ff.
• Gunter Wesener : Roman Law and Natural Law (= History of the Law Faculty of the University of Graz. Part 1). Graz 1978, pp. 79-85.

Web links

• Literature by and about Leopold Wenger in the catalog of the German National Library
• Entry on Leopold Wenger in the Austria Forum  (in the AEIOU Austria Lexicon )
• Website of the Leopold Wenger Institute

Individual evidence

1. ↑ 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 (20 f.).
2. ↑ Dieter Nörr : Leopold Wenger (1874 - 1953) , in: Thinkers, researchers and discoverers: a history of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in historical portraits, ed. by Dietmar Willoweit (Munich 2009), p. 269 ( online in the Google book search)
3. ↑ Member entry of Leopold Wenger (with picture) at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences , accessed on February 1, 2016.

predecessor	Office	successor
Karl Ritter von Goebel	President of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences from 1932 to 1935	Karl Alexander von Müller