Carl Georg von Wachter

Carl Georg von Wachter was a nineteenth-century German jurist from an old Wurttemberg civil-service family who briefly served as president of the appellate court of the four free cities before moving to Leipzig, where he continued writing on both private and criminal law. His handbook on Wurttemberg private law aimed to describe the law actually in force there as a single body, without the traditional distinction between local custom and imported Roman law, in preparation for eventual codification, and he also produced a handbook on the criminal law of Saxony and Thuringia. Wachter is chiefly remembered today for his contribution to private international law, particularly his critique of the older statutist theories that had governed how courts chose between conflicting laws. Once ranked among the greatest German jurists of his century, his work fell into relative obscurity in the twentieth century before being rediscovered by later scholars of conflict of laws.