Karl Adolph von Vangerow

Karl Philipp Adolph von Vangerow was a German jurist who lived from 5 June 1808 to 11 October 1870 and became, in the judgment of later legal historians, probably the most successful teacher of the Pandects, the Roman-law-based civil law tradition, of the entire 19th century. He became an extraordinary professor at the University of Marburg in 1833 and an ordinary professor there in 1837, before moving in 1840 to the University of Heidelberg, where he held the chair of Roman law, succeeding Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut, for the following thirty years until his death. Between roughly 1840 and 1860 he ranked in reputation among German Pandectists just behind Friedrich Carl von Savigny and alongside Georg Friedrich Puchta. His principal work, first published as the three-volume Leitfaden fur Pandekten-Vorlesungen between 1839 and 1849 and later reissued as the Lehrbuch der Pandekten, went through seven editions and became a standard textbook of German legal education, and the city of Heidelberg made him an honorary citizen and later named a street after him.