Marie Theres Fögen

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Marie Theres Fögen at a symposium at Dumbarton Oaks (1992)

Marie Theres Fögen (born October 10, 1946 in Lüdinghausen , † January 18, 2008 in Zurich ) was a German lawyer and legal historian . She taught Roman law at the University of Zurich and was director of the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt .

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Marie Theres Fögen studied law at the universities of Munich and Frankfurt . In 1970 she completed her studies with the first state examination. In 1973 she received her doctorate in Frankfurt as a student of Dieter Simon with the work The Struggle for the Judicial Public. In 1975 Fögen passed the second state examination. Afterwards she was admitted to the bar and at the same time remained active in research. First she was Simon's assistant at the University of Frankfurt for five years and worked on a research project on Byzantine legal history funded by the DFG . Between 1980 and 1995 she did research as a research assistant at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt. From 1980 to 1994, Fögen also taught as a part-time lecturer for private and commercial law at the EBS University of Economics and Law in Oestrich-Winkel .

In 1993, Marie Theres Fögen completed her habilitation in the Law Faculty of the University of Frankfurt with a thesis on the prohibition of the activities of fortune-tellers and astrologers in the late ancient Roman Empire. Fögen interprets this ban as a measure to enforce an “imperial monopoly on knowledge” (so the subtitle of the book published in 1993). The emperors forbade the activity of fortune tellers and astrologers in order to be able to control the ideas and world views circulating in the empire by establishing an "imperial administration of knowledge" (Chapter VIII 4).

Two years after her habilitation, Marie Theres Fögen became professor for Roman law, private law and comparative law at the University of Zurich . In 2001 she was also appointed director of the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt by the Max Planck Society . In autumn 2007 she announced her resignation as director at the Max Planck Institute for health reasons on March 31, 2008. Marie Theres Fögen retained her professorship in Zurich until her death in January 2008.

Marie Theres Fögen completed research stays at the University of Vienna (1979/80) and at the research library of Dumbarton Oaks , Washington, DC (1993), as well as visiting professorships at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales , Paris, and at the Department of History at Harvard University (1995).

Scientific work

The focus of Marie Theres Fögen's research was on Roman and Byzantine legal history. She also dealt with the history of science of law in numerous studies.

Fögen turned against the widespread notion that knowledge of Roman law could be used for direct use in today's civil law. Their thinking contradicts an idea of ​​the history of law as an organic development following certain internal laws. Instead of a consistent, logically evolving Roman legal history, she wanted to tell many “Roman legal histories” (the title of a book from 2002 that caused a sensation and was translated into several languages). For Fögen, a scholarly examination of Roman law was also possible in such a way that its history can be understood as the "evolution of a social system". She doubted the idea that the dogmatics of Roman law could be updated into the present and the view that Roman law could become the basis of a new common European Ius Commune .

As a scholarly writer, Marie Theres Fögen knew how to stimulate and provoke research on legal history with interesting ideas.

In his obituary, Jürgen Kaube ( FAZ ) writes that in Frankfurt Marie Theres Fögen “became a student of the Byzantinist Dieter Simon , whose polemical and learned style ideal she cultivated in many reviews that did not take prisoners”. To conclude, it says: "European legal history has lost one of its most original and sharpest minds."

According to Uwe Justus Wenzel ( NZZ ), she succeeded in combining “erudition, philological meticulousness and risk-taking interpretation”; he honors Marie Theres Fögen as "a wonderful scientist, a gifted university teacher and a brilliant author".

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Remarks

  1. ↑ Jürgen Kaube: Law Song , in: "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" of January 19, 2008, p. 34
  2. ^ Uwe Justus Wenzel: The stories of law , in: " Neue Zürcher Zeitung " from 19./20. January 2008, p. 26
personal data
SURNAME Fögen, Marie Theres
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer and legal historian
DATE OF BIRTH October 10, 1946
PLACE OF BIRTH Ludinghausen
DATE OF DEATH January 18, 2008
Place of death Zurich