Adolf Merkel

Adolf Merkel was a German legal scholar and criminal law theorist of the nineteenth century who studied at Giessen, Gottingen and Berlin before habilitating at Rudolf von Jhering's encouragement. He held professorships at Prague, then at Vienna as successor to Julius Glaser, and finally at the newly founded University of Strasbourg, where he served as rector. Merkel was among the leading philosophers of criminal law of his generation, working through the theoretical foundations of criminal responsibility and legal norms as German criminal law scholarship rapidly systematized. His son Rudolf Merkel continued the family's legal scholarship as a professor of law at Freiburg.