Feuerbach

Feuerbach, PAUL JOHANN ANSELM VON, one of the most distinguished criminal jurists of Germany, was born at Jena, 14th November 1775. From the gymnasium at Frankfurt-on-Main, where his father was an advocate, he passed in 1792 to Jena to study first philosophy, then law. Already he had made a brilliant reputation by his Kritik des natürlichen Rechts (1796), and his Anti-Hobbes (1798), when he began to deliver lectures which introduced into criminal jurisprudence a new method of treatment, systematised in his Lehr- buch des gemeinen peinlichen Rechts (1801; 14th ed. 1847). This celebrated work placed Feuerbach at the head of a new school of jurists, who maintain that the decision of the judge in every case ought to be determined solely by an express deliverance of the penal law, never by his own discretion, and who on that account obtained the name of Rigorists. It gave a powerful impetus to the feeling in favour of more humane and less vindictive punishments. In 1801 he was appointed professor in Jena, but in 1802 accepted a call to Kiel. In 1804 he removed to Landshut; but next year he was transferred to an official post in Munich, and in 1808 was appointed privy-councillor. The new penal code which he planned for Bavaria (1813) was taken as a basis in the emendation of the criminal law of several other countries. During this period also he published his Merkwürdige Kriminalrechtsfälle (1808-11). In his Geschworenengericht (1813) he maintained that the verdict of a jury is not necessarily adequate legal proof of a crime. Supplements were published in 1819 and 1821, and a second volume was added in 1825. In 1814 Feuerbach became second president of the Court of Appeal in Bamberg, and afterwards first president of the Court of Appeal at Anspach. In 1832 he published a work on Kaspar Hauser (q.v.). He had just edited a collection of his Kleine Schriften when he died suddenly at Frankfort-on-Main, 25th May 1833. An interesting life was written by his son Ludwig (2 vols. 1852).