Victor D'Hondt

Victor D'Hondt (1841 to 1901) was a Belgian lawyer and professor of civil law at Ghent University, remembered for the D'Hondt method of allocating seats in party-list proportional representation, which he first described in 1878. Born in Ghent into a family of Catholic lawyers, he practised at the Ghent bar for about ten years, became registrar of the Commercial Court of Ghent and was elected to the city council in 1872. From 1881 he campaigned for proportional representation, helping found a Belgian reform association and publishing works between 1882 and 1885 that set out a practical system. In 1885 he became professor of civil and fiscal law at Ghent, where he also taught tax law and notarial law, published a journal on commercial law and was among the first professors to teach openly in Dutch. The Belgian constitution was rewritten in 1899 to apply his method nationwide, and it is now used in many countries.