Karl Engisch

Karl Engisch was born at the tail end of the nineteenth century in Gießen, a mid-sized university town north of Frankfurt.[1] Friedrich Engisch (1871-1943), his father was a lawyer. He passed his Abitur (school final exams) which would normally have opened the way to a university education, but these were the war years, and the eighteen year old was now sent to take part in the fighting.[4] He was wounded twice.[5] After the war he studied law at Gießen and Munich between 1918 and 1921. His teachers included Wolfgang Mittermaier, Leo Rosenberg, Ernst Beling and Reinhard Frank. From very early on Engisch was strongly drawn not so much to the mainstream Jurisprudence curriculum but to the philosophy of law, seen then as now as more of a niche specialism. Two leading scholars who particularly influenced him in this field were Max Weber at Munich and Ernst von Aster at Gießen.[1] During his time at Gießen Karl Engisch, like his younger brother Ludwig Engisch (1900–1957),[6] was a member of the "Corps Hassia" fraternity. In 1924 Karl Engisch received his doctorate. Supervised by Otto Eger, his dissertation concerned Imperative Theory,[7] an aspect of Legal Philosophy, and a theory which German sources impute to Jeremy Bentham and John Austin.[8]

He undertook a Rechtsreferendariat (loosely "training, clerkship or under articles") period between 1924 and 1927, working in his father's law practice.[9] He took on the criminal law cases. In 1929 he received his habilitation (higher academic qualification) at Gießen. His work was supervised by the criminologist Wolfgang Mittermaier (1867–1956) and comprised a substantial monograph on criminal intent and negligence which even today, despite dramatic swings back and forth in the evolution of criminal sciences in the intervening decades, continues to be regarded by admirers as a standard work in its field.[1]

A powerful influence during this period was the Munich-based criminologist Ernst von Beling, to whom Engisch later dedicated his "Logische Studien zur Gesetzesanwendung" (loosely: "Logical studies in the application of law"). He accepted teaching posts in Criminal Law at University of Freiburg (1929) and Munich (1932).[1] In October 1933 he returned to take up a criminal law teaching post at Gießen.[9]

The Nazi seizure of power in January 1933 was followed, in April 1933, by the so-called "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service" ("Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums"). The law was progressively implemented across the civil service (which in German included the universities sector) over the next few months. The man who held the teaching chair in Criminal Law at Heidelberg University, Gustav Radbruch, had been a government minister during the early 1920s. He was a Social Democratic. Despite not being Jewish, Radbruch's political record meant that he was just the sort of person whom the authorities had in mind when designing their law. He was dismissed. Karl Engisch was by now a party member and well regarded in the relevant academic circles. He took over the teaching chair in criminal law, criminal process and the philosophy of law at Heidelberg University. Despite the circumstances, Radbruch reacted with generosity. He said that he could think of no successor that he would prefer, and there are suggestions that Engisch would not have disappointed him. Clearly Engisch was not deeply political, and he failed to see through the Nazis in the early years. But sound academic scepticism protected him from slavish adherence to anyone's party line.[1] Where he cited Jewish authors in his written work, he simply ignored government strictures that they should go unacknowledged, even as many academic colleagues simply stopped acknowledging Jewish contributions in their work. Engisch displayed a certain amount of backbone in May 1935 after the student union called for a boycott of non-Aryan lecturers.[10] As dean of the faculty he protested (unsuccessfully) when Nazi "SA" paramilitaries intervened against the university administration to enforce a boycott of Jewish lecturers, notably in respect of Ernst Levy.[10] He was one of those jurists who rejected the intervention of Nazi ideology into the law, and avoided the inclusion of such themes in his own books. On the other hand, he did expressly, if crudely, support the government in a review he contributed in 1936 to "Archiv für die civilistische Praxis", a venerable and distinguished legal journal:

"The Laws of the National Socialist state are the leader's orders, and that makes them laws. Resistance by judges' and enforcement officers cannot carry the weight of law. Acts of forcible resistance cannot be called law where they blatantly contradict basic principles of National Socialism. In the final analysis these are personally generated concepts that border on embarrassing".[11][lower-alpha 1]

During this period Engisch turned down invitation to take up academic posts at Marburg (1933), Leipzig (1938) and Vienna (1940). In June 1942 the Minister for Culture and Education appointed him Legal Counsel ("Rechtsbeirat") to the University of Heidelberg with responsibilities covering academic discipline.[9]

War ended in May 1945, and the twelve Nazi years came to an end. The western two thirds of Germany was now divided into military occupation zones. Heidelberg University was a high-profile institution within the US occupation zone. On 2 January 1946 Karl Engisch was dismissed from his university posts on the orders of the US military commander. On 5 December 1946 his professorship was reinstated, however, and on 16 December 1950 he was granted tenure at Heidelberg for life. (In April 1950 he had turned down an invitation to move to Hamburg University.)

In 1953 he finally accepted an invitation to move. He transferred to the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, taking over the teaching chair vacated by Edmund Mezger.[1] He retired from the post only in April 1967.[9] In the meantime, at the Kösener Senioren-Convents-Verband (association of student fraternities) congress, held on 27 May 1955, he delivered the main address at the Würzburg Residence (palace).[12] He returned to Heidelberg where, on 30 November 1972, he accepted an honorary professorship and, till his death on 11 September 1990, delivered lectures on criminal law and the philosophy of law.[9]

In his lectures Engisch knew how to expand his subject's horizons beyond the framework commonly accepted in the law faculty, introducing concepts from the worlds of philosophy and literature. Those whom he most frequently cited included Goethe, Kant, Thomas Mann and Schopenhauer.

He received honorary doctorates from the universities of Heidelberg, Mannheim and Saragossa. He was awarded the Bavarian Order of Merit in 1961, and enjoyed membership of the Heidelberg and Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, conferred respectively in 1938 and 1956. In 1971 he became a corresponding member of the Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium.

Engisch was a co-editor of two academic journals. He also possessed one of the largest specialist private libraries on legal theory of the times. Part of it had to be stored out of town at a separate site.

Among students his best known publication is probably "Einführung in das juristische Denken" ("Introduction to Legal Thinking") which first appeared in 1956. By 2005 it had reached its tenth edition. The work has been translated into Portuguese (1965), Spanish (1967) and Greek (1981)

Note