Karl von Lilienthal

Karl von Lilienthal (1853 to 1927) was a German scholar of jurisprudence who became a university professor of criminal law. Born into a Protestant family at Elberfeld, he worked briefly as an Assessor at the Wuppertal District Court and then taught successively at Halle, Zürich and Marburg and, from 1896 to 1924, at Heidelberg, where he served several terms as Dean of the Law Faculty and, for some years between 1902 and 1919, also worked part time as an assistant district judge. In 1902 he was one of eight eminent jurists invited to join the government's Criminal Justice Committee, whose recommendations for reform of the criminal law he commented on for the rest of his life. In 1925 he criticised the newly drafted penal code, calling for the paragraphs restricting abortion rights to be removed and for the criminalisation of homosexual acts to end.