Ulrich Stutz

Ulrich Stutz (1868 to 1938) was a Swiss-German jurist and historian and a pioneer of the academic study of canon law. Born in Zürich, he studied law at Zürich and Berlin, where he took his doctorate in 1892 with a dissertation on the administration of church property after the Roman period, published in 1895 as the first part of a history of ecclesiastical benefices. After a lectureship at Basel he held chairs of canon law and German legal history at Freiburg in 1896, Bonn in 1904 and Berlin in 1917, founded the Institute for Canon Law at Bonn and launched the canon law section of the Savigny-Zeitschrift für Rechtsgeschichte. He is associated above all with the theory of the proprietary church, or Eigenkirche, which traced private ownership of churches by their founders to ancient Germanic custom and which later scholars have revised. A conservative German nationalist who opposed Nazism, he took early retirement in 1936 rather than cooperate with the coordination of his law faculty, and died in Berlin in 1938.