Rudolf Max Littauer

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Rudolf Max Littauer (born October 29, 1905 in Leipzig ; † January 8, 2002 in Sarasota , Florida ) was a German legal scholar and lawyer in the USA. In 1939 he became an American citizen.

Life

Rudolf Max Littauerboden studied law and was named after the first legal state exam in 1928 at the University of Leipzig with a thesis on arbitration to Dr. iur. PhD. In 1930 he passed the 2nd state examination in law. From 1931 he worked as an assistant judge at the Leipzig Regional Court . He was also employed as an assistant at the University of Leipzig at the chair of his teacher Ernst Jaeger and was considered a talent among the young academics there. As early as 1933, he emigrated to the USA to avoid persecution by the National Socialists .

There he was one of those - numerically rather few - emigrated lawyers who fully came to terms with the legal system of the new homeland and qualified and worked accordingly. Littauer became an assistant professor at the New School of Social Research in New York. From the mid-1930s he became involved in the important emergency community of German scientists abroad and was in this context also responsible for assessing the qualifications of migrants, which was an important step for their access to training and work in the USA. After graduating in American law in 1936, he settled as a lawyer in New York in 1939 and became a member of the New York Bar. After providing legal advice for refugees from Europe until the 1940s, he turned to the in the late 1940s Treatment of "American" cases too. In the following decades he was a partner in at least two New York law firms.

Littauer worked scientifically primarily in the field of business law and comparative law . During the war he published on legal issues relating to the treatment of enemy property , particularly in the field of patent law . Before the war he worked from 1937 to 1940 on the journal Intellectual Property founded by migrants from Germany , for which he accepted and supervised articles from North America. There he also published what is probably the only contemporary statement by a lawyer with a German background on the legal dispute in the USA, whether Adolf Hitler was entitled to a copyright to his book Mein Kampf in den USA. Littauer answered this question in the affirmative at an early stage in the proceedings.

After the war, in addition to his work as a lawyer in the USA, from 1968 onwards Littauer also worked as an honorary professor at the University of Erlangen , where he taught international law and comparative law.

Littauer died on January 8, 2002. He left behind his wife Hilde, geb. Apt, who he had been married to for 63 years, and a son. His daughter had died before him.

Works (selection)

  • Arbitration and substantive law. Leipzig, Univ., Jur. Diss., 1928 = Journal for German Civil Proceedings 55 (1929), 1–38.
  • The Waring Case. In: US Trademark Association Bulletin (New Series) 32 (1937), 377 ff.
  • Political and Economic Democracy. New York 1937.
  • The Present Legal Status of Artists, Recorders and Broadcasters in America. In: Intellectual property 3 (1937/1938), 217 ff.
  • The copyright in Hitler's "Mein Kampf". In: Copyright 5 (1939/1940), 57 ff.
  • Confiscation of the Property of Technical Enemies. In: Yale Law Journal 52 (1943), 739 ff.
  • Settlement of Claims to Blocked Funds. In: International Arbitration Journal 1 (1945), 78 ff.
  • The Unfreezing of Foreign Funds. In: Columbia Law Review 45 (1945), 132 ff.
  • The American emission law. In: Journal for the entire credit system 1954, 623 ff.

literature

  • Ernst C. Stiefel , Frank Mecklenburger: German lawyers in American exile (1933-1950). 1991, pp. 28 ff., 128 f.
  • Stephan Wendehorst: Building Blocks of a Jewish History of the University of Leipzig. 2006, p. 225.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The second name Max can be found in full in the data record GND 117064777 .
  2. ↑ Stiefel, Mecklenburg, German Jurists in American Exile (1933-1950) , p. 128
  3. ↑ Horst Göppinger : Jurists of Jewish descent in the “Third Reich”. Disenfranchisement and persecution. 2nd ed. 1990, p. 299
  4. ↑ See Simon Apel, Matthias Wießner, Die Zeitschrift "Intellectual Property - Copyright - La Propriété Intellectuelle" (1935-1940) . In: Journal for Intellectual Property (ZGE) 2 (2010), 89 (97 f.); s. now also Katharina de la Durantaye on this. Hitler's "Mein Kampf" and the copyright protection of works of stateless persons in: Kirsten-Inger Wöhrn, Eike W. Grunert, Claudia Ohst, Winfried Bullinger, Festschrift for Artur-Axel Wandtke on his 70th birthday , 2013, p. 319 ff.
  5. ↑ On the outcome of the trial, Note, Yale Law Journal 49 (1939), 132 ff.
  6. ↑ See also archived copy ( Memento of the original dated February 14, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.jura.uni-erlangen.de
  7. ↑ See the New York Times obituary, January 15, 2002, Section A, p. 19 (New York Edition)
personal data
SURNAME Littauer, Rudolf Max
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer
DATE OF BIRTH October 29, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Leipzig
DATE OF DEATH January 8, 2002
Place of death Sarasota