Walter Erdmann (legal scholar)

Walter Erdmann (born July 1, 1882 in Ehrenbreitstein ; † January 27, 1955 in Berlin ) was a German legal scholar .

life and work

Walter Erdmann, the son of an officer, attended high school in Barmen and then studied law at the universities of Marburg , Bonn , Berlin and Jena . On July 30, 1908, he was promoted to Dr. jur. PhD (magna cum laude).

For health reasons, Erdmann was initially unable to pursue a career. He lived in Merano for several years as a private individual and then as a cure . During this time he dealt intensively with legal historical research. He wrote a paper on marriage in ancient Greece, which resulted from a prize assignment from the Samson Foundation of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences . Due to his illness and his distance from the library, the turmoil of the war and post-war, and the period of inflation , the font could only appear in 1934.

In 1928, on the initiative of Ernst Rabel , Erdmann received a position at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, as secretary of the interpolation index. Erdmann had favorable conditions for scientific work in Berlin. Together with Georg H. Maier , he edited the 23rd book of the Pandects and participated in the Vocabularium Iurisprudentiae Romanae (VIR), for which he prepared the letter L. In the 1940s he wrote several articles for the Realencyclopedia of Classical Classical Studies (RE). In 1939 Erdmann was employed as deputy director of the library of the law seminar at Berlin University . He did not get the assistant position he wanted because the party authorities did not consider him loyal to the line.

After the Second World War , Erdmann also received an academic teaching post . Even though he was of an advanced age and had little teaching experience, he was commissioned as a proven expert on legal history in the summer semester of 1946 to hold lectures on Roman law at the Humboldt University. On July 30, 1947 , he completed his habilitation in Roman law, and on February 29, 1948, he was appointed professor with a teaching assignment for this subject. Because of his distance from the prevailing ideology (Erdmann behaved apolitically throughout his life) he was hardly recognized at the university. A move to the Free University of Berlin , which Erdmann aspired to in 1951, was rejected because of his old age. In 1952 Erdmann retired from Humboldt University at the age of 69 . He worked for the VIR at the Berlin Academy until his death.

Erdmann's research focus was ancient Greek law. After completing his dissertation, he only dealt with Roman law occasionally in individual miscommunications and reviews. Based on his main work The Marriage in Ancient Greece (1934), which treated marriage according to literary and epigraphic sources from the archaic to the classical period, Erdmann dealt with the development of this institute in Hellenism . To this end, he mainly used papyrus documents . His studies appeared in the journal of the Savigny Foundation for Legal History and in various anthologies.

Fonts (selection)

• The development of testamentary freedom in Roman law . Jena 1908 (dissertation)
• Marriage in ancient Greece . Munich 1934

literature

• Hans Julius Wolff : In memoriam Walter Erdmann . In: Journal of the Savigny Foundation for Legal History. Romance Department . Volume 73 (1956), pp. 496-498
• Kristin Kleibert: The Law Faculty of the Humboldt University in Berlin in transition - The years 1948 to 1951 . Berlin 2010, pp. 90-100