ЮЛІАН ЗАЯЦЬ – ПРАВОЗНАВЕЦЬ, ХУДОЖНИК, СПІВАК (1880–1971)

Abstract

The article covers the professional, scientific and artistic activity of Yulian Semenovych Zayats (1880–1971). The figure of Yulian Zayats remains a little-studied figure among Ukrainian jurists and artists. Studying at the Faculty of Law of the Lviv University in 1899–1904, Julian Zayats published in 1904 an article «Jusus fructus nominis» in the «Journal of Law and Economics». In 1907 this scientific work was finalized and defended at the Lviv University. In 1901–1902 he studied at the Faculty of Law of the Jagiellonian University and at the Krakow Academy of Arts. Since 1906 he had been working in the financial prosecutor's office in Lviv. In 1909 he received a scholarship from the Austrian Ministry of Education and Religion and completed an internship at the Faculty of Law of the University of Berlin in 1909–1912 to write a doctoral thesis as well as studied at the Berlin Academy of Arts. In Berlin, Julian Zayats prepared a doctoral habilitation thesis in Polish on the topic: «Jus jurandum in litem», which was submitted for defense to the Faculty of Law of the Lviv University in 1912. Due to the position of Polish university professors, as Julian Zayats notes in his autobiography, the text of the thesis was lost and the defense did not take place. During the First World War, as an officer of the Austro-Hungarian Army, he took part in hostilities and taught ballistics at the Military Artillery School in Budapest. After Poland's conquest of western Ukraine, he worked as a lawyer and taught Roman law at the Ukrainian Secret University in Lviv. He continued to work in the Polish state treasury again. At the request of Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, he provided legal advice to him and the Greek Catholic Church as well as prepared an appeal to the League of Nations and the Vatican regarding the discriminatory policy of the Polish state towards the Ukrainian population during the so-called "pacification". During the interwar period he studied at the Lviv Conservatory and gave solo concerts in the cities of Western Ukraine and Poland. In January 1939 he was appointed a judge of the Administrative Tribunal of Poland by the President of Poland I. Moscitsky. During World War II, he headed a non-German court in the Galicia district, jurisdiction of which included minor criminal and civil jurisdictions. After the liberation of Western Ukraine from Nazi Germany, Julian Zayats was arrested but was released two months later because of lack of corpus delicti. In 1945–1946 he worked as an associate professor at the Department of Civil Law and Procedure of the Lviv University, and subsequently in the Lviv Scientific Library named after V. Stefanyk as a bookbinder and librarian. He left a great artistic legacy. He exhibited his paintings at exhibitions in 1929, 1930, 1937 and other years.