Rudolph B. Schlesinger 1909-1996

Abstract

Barely one year after celebrating him, the Journal joins his legion of friends in mourning him. Rudolf B. Schlesinger, Professor Emeritus at Cornell Law School and at Hastings College of Law, Honorary Member of the American Society of Comparative Law, and long an Editor of this Journal, and his wife, Ruth, died on November 10, 1996 in San Francisco. With his death the comparative law community has lost the man who more than any other person had come to symbolize it during this past half-century. Rudolf Schlesinger was born in Germany in 1909; thanks to his father's passport he was a citizen of the United States from birth.' Raised in Germany, he began his law studies in 1927, first at Geneva (to be accurate, he studied tennis and French Literature while registered at the law faculty), and completed them at Munich with a twosemester interruption in 1928 for studies in Berlin. He completed his legal education in eight semesters and in 1931 received the first-place rank in Bavaria for the written examination. During the apprenticeship period leading to the second state examination Schlesinger also worked in his father's law office, represented indigent criminal defendants on his own, and, most significantly in light of his future career, began work on a dissertation with a well-known professor of commercial law, Rudolf Miiller-Erzbach.2 The advent of the Third Reich and the immediate expulsion of Jewish professionals from their positions also had its consequences for those still in the early stages of their studies or careers. The apprenticeship preparation for the second state examination became moot with the closure of the door to the profession, and Rudi Schlesinger threw himself more fully into his dissertation research. The academic examination for the doctorate had been set for the end of 1933; but warned by a courageous Miiller-Erzbach in May of that year of a decision to block promotions to the doctorate for Jews after the summer 1933 semester, and advised to submit the thesis immedi-