Concept

Gustav Radbruch

Summary
Gustav Radbruch (21 November 1878 – 23 November 1949) was a German legal scholar and politician. He served as Minister of Justice of Germany during the early Weimar period. Radbruch is also regarded as one of the most influential legal philosophers of the 20th century. Born in Lübeck, Radbruch studied law in Munich, Leipzig and Berlin. He passed his first bar exam ("Staatsexamen") in Berlin in 1901, and the following year he received his doctorate with a dissertation on "The Theory of Adequate Causation". This was followed in 1903 by his qualification to teach criminal law in Heidelberg. In 1904, he was appointed Professor of criminal and trial law and legal philosophy in Heidelberg. In 1914 he accepted a call to a professorship in Königsberg, and later that year assumed a professorship at Kiel. Radbruch was a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), and held a seat in the Reichstag from 1920 to 1924. In 1921–22 and throughout 1923, he was minister of justice in the cabinets of Joseph Wirth and Gustav Stresemann. During his time in office, a number of important laws were implemented, such as those giving women access to the justice system, and, after the assassination of Walter Rathenau, the law for the protection of the republic. In 1926, Radbruch accepted a renewed call to lecture at Heidelberg where he delivered his inaugural lecture entitled "Der Mensch im Recht (Law's Image of the Human)" as the newly appointed Professor of Criminal Law on 13 November 1926. After the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933, Radbruch, as a former Social Democratic politician, was dismissed from his university post under the terms of the so-called "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service" ("Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums"). (The universities, as public bodies, were subject to civil service laws and regulations.) Despite the employment ban in Nazi Germany, during 1935/36 he was able to spend a year in England, at University College, Oxford.
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