Memories

This book is a memoir that a great master of comparative law wrote for the benefit of his children and grandchildren. It is the story of the life and accomplishments of a man that had to flee Nazi brutality and found a new home in the United States. The life and the work of this exceptionally gifted scholar are vividly conveyed in a text that offers the context in which comparative law “came of age” as a mature academic discipline. The work of Schlesinger is alive in The Common Core of European Private Law where he served as an honorary editor. This book contains a foreword by Professor Ugo Mattei, who was a student of Schlesinger’s and later his successor on the Chair of Comparative Law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law.

Rudolf B. Schlesinger has been a towering figure of comparative jurisprudence whose influence has been global. A German refugee scholar, he was educated at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and Columbia University and was a professor at Cornell Law School (1948-1975) and University of California, Hastings College of the Law (1975-1996). The “factual approach” he developed in the early 1960s at the Cornell seminars, and the book Comparative Law, that reached its 7th edition, have set the methodological standards of the discipline worldwide.