Remembering Kurt

One of the great pleasures of learning the law when I did was that I came into contact with a very special set of teachers who had escaped from Germany in the Thirties and had come to England or North America to continue the teaching of law.

E. J. Cohn, David Daube, John. G. Fleming, Rudolf Graupner, Max Grünhut, Hermann Kantorowicz, Otto Kahn-Freund, Hersch Lauterpacht, Gerhard Leibholz, Kurt Lipstein, F. A. Mann, Hermann Mannheim, Lassa Oppenheim, Otto Prausnitz, Fritz Pringsheim, Gustav Radbruch, Clive Schmitthoff, Fritz Schulz, Georg Schwarzenberger, Walter Ullmann, Martin Wolff, Hans Kelsen and Wolfgang Friedmann.

I was taught by Daube and Kahn-Freund – and like most lawyers, encountered Fleming on Torts, Kelsen’s great theories and Mann and Schmitthoff through their treatises.

A great list of extraordinary scholars, whose influence is now captured in a book, Jurists Uprooted, assessing their contribution to the law of their new countries.

At conferences at Cambridge in the Eighties I came into contact with the wonderful Kurt Lipstein, who held the chair in Comparative Law there, and had written one of the earliest books on Community Law.

Kurt is remembered at the Squire Law Library site by a set of pages, which includes details of his extraordinary career, and reminiscences of the expansion of the Squire Law Library and his research interests. A lovely man – he died last year at 97.