Rudolf Arnold Nieberding

Rudolf Arnold Nieberding (1838 to 1912) was a German jurist and politician, born at Konitz, now Chojnice in Poland, the son of a teacher who became director of the Gymnasium Petrinum in Recklinghausen. He studied law at Breslau, Heidelberg and Berlin, finished in 1863 and worked at the regional administration of Breslau, then from 1866 at the Prussian ministry of commerce, and from 1872 to 1889 at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. In 1893 he became Secretary of State of the Reichsjustizamt, a post he kept under four chancellors until 1909, and in it he coordinated the drafting of the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, the Commercial Code and the codes of criminal law and of criminal and civil procedure. In 1907 he told the Reichstag that the lese-majesty laws produced a climate of denunciation.