Rudolf B. Schlesinger

Rudolf B. Schlesinger was a German-American legal scholar, born in Munich in 1909 and holding American citizenship through his father, who fled Nazi Germany as a Jewish refugee and immigrated to the United States in 1938. He joined the faculty of Cornell Law School in 1948, where he became a professor of comparative law, and his influential 1950 textbook helped give the field greater legitimacy and popularity within American legal academia. In the 1960s he launched the Cornell project on contract formation, pioneering what became known as the factual approach to comparative legal research, a methodology that later influenced the Common Core of European Private Law Project's study of contract, property and tort law across multiple jurisdictions. He moved to the University of California Hastings College of the Law in 1975, retiring in 1995, and died in San Francisco in 1996.