Karl Larenz

Karl Larenz, born 23 April 1903 in Wesel, Germany, and who died 24 January 1993 in Olching, Germany, was a German legal scholar and philosopher who studied at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, Marburg University, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the University of Gottingen, completing a doctorate in law in 1926 on Hegel and a habilitation in 1929 at Gottingen. He began teaching law at Kiel University in 1933 and joined the Nazi Party in 1937, becoming one of the leading Nazi legal theorists in the domain of civil law; he was banned from teaching after the Second World War until 1949, after which he taught again at Kiel and, from 1960, at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He authored influential textbooks including the 1953 Lehrbuch des Schuldrechts on the law of obligations and the 1960 Methodenlehre der Rechtswissenschaft on legal methodology, both of which remained in print into the twenty-first century.