Valtazar Bogišić

Valtazar Bogišić (1834 to 1908) was a Serb jurist from Dubrovnik and a pioneer in sociology. Born in Cavtat into a merchant family, he studied philology, philosophy and law in Vienna, Berlin, Munich and Paris, took a doctorate in philosophy at Giessen in 1862 and worked at the Viennese court library before accepting a professorship at the new Russian University in Odessa in 1869. In 1873 he left for Montenegro to codify private law, and his General Property Code for the Principality of Montenegro, proclaimed in 1888, rests on questionnaires he had sent out to collect legal customs, which made him a pioneer of ethnological and sociological legal research. In private law his best known research concerned family structure and that Montenegrin civil code. A follower of the German Historical School of law, he is regarded as a transitional figure between that school and sociological approaches. He was for some time Minister of Justice in the Principality of Montenegro and in 1902 was elected president of the International Institute of Sociology in Paris.