Jacob Giltaij: Fritz Schulz, Refugee Scholarship, and the Riccobono Seminar

Fritz Schulz (1879–1957) was among a number of German refugee scholars of Roman law at the advent of the Second World War. He left Germany for Oxford in 1939. Key to understanding his departure from Germany, and indeed a significant turn in his scholarship, is a series of lectures he gave at the University of Berlin, subsequently published as Prinzipien des römischen Rechts in 1934. The significance of the Prinzipien emerges when one contrasts the German academic world with its counterparts in the United Kingdom and the United States. There was already, before the War, a measure of transnational traffc by scholars of legal history and legal theory, but deteriorating circumstances in the German universities led Schulz to refashion his scholarship in a manner that would encourage its reception by Anglo-American scholars. This is evident not only in the Prinzipien, but also in his 1936 contribution to the Riccobono Seminar at the Catholic University in Washington, DC.