Sebastiaan Matheus Sigismund de Ranitz

Sebastiaan Matheus Sigismund de Ranitz (1833 to 1909) was a Dutch jurist and parliamentarian who served three terms in the House of Representatives and nineteen years as a justice of the Supreme Court of the Netherlands. Born in Groningen, the son of the city's mayor, he studied law at Utrecht, graduating in 1858, and worked as a public prosecutor at Winschoten, Zutphen and Zwolle before becoming prosecutor for the district court in Arnhem in 1879. A member of the Liberal Union, he sat for Zutphen from the 1884 election until 1888 and chaired the Justice Committee in 1887. In 1889 he became a justice of the Amsterdam Court of Appeal, then of the Hague Court of Appeals, and in 1890 King William III appointed him to the Supreme Court of the Netherlands.