Raymond Saleilles

Raymond Saleilles was a French jurist who lived from 14 January 1855 to 3 March 1912, born in Beaune and educated in both the Catholic and state law faculties of Paris. He taught briefly at Grenoble before spending a decade at Dijon, teaching legal history and constitutional law from 1889 to 1895, and then held the tenured chair of civil law at the Paris law faculty from 1898 until his death, where in 1901 he created a dedicated chair in comparative civil law. He co-founded the Society of Legislative Studies in 1902 and served as its secretary-general, organized the major symposium marking the centenary of the Napoleonic Code in 1904, and, with Francois Geny, helped found the school of free scientific research, a movement seeking to move French legal method beyond rigid exegesis of the Code's text toward a historically informed and evolving interpretation. His works include De l'Individualisation de la Peine of 1898, on tailoring punishment to the offender, De la Declaration de Volonte of 1901, and De la Personnalite Juridique of 1910, and he understood comparative law as a path toward what he called a common law of civilized humanity.