Slobodan Jovanović

Slobodan Jovanović (1869 to 1958) was a Serbian and Yugoslav lawyer, historian, philosopher, writer and statesman, one of the most prominent intellectuals of his time. Born in Újvidék in Austria-Hungary, today Novi Sad, he took a law degree after study in Belgrade, Munich, Zürich and Geneva and did postgraduate work in constitutional law and political science in Paris before entering the Serbian foreign service. From 1897 to 1940 he was professor at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Law, rector of the university twice and president of the Serbian Royal Academy from 1928 to 1931, with a reputation as an authority on constitutional law. In 1920 he chaired the committee that drafted what became the Vidovdan Constitution, and he was a critic of Hans Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law, arguing that Kelsen's basic norm could be reduced to classical German theories of the state as a legal person. He was deputy prime minister in 1941 and prime minister of the Yugoslav government-in-exile in London from January 1942 to June 1943, and a communist court sentenced him in absentia to twenty years in prison.