Home > West's Encyclopedia of American Law > Schlesinger, Rudolf Berthold

Legal scholar, author, and professor, Rudolf B. Schlesinger achieved fame for his ground-breaking work in the study of international legal systems. Schlesinger was known as the dean of comparative law, a discipline that examines the differences and similarities among the legal systems of nations. His arrival in the field during the early 1950s helped to give it both greater legitimacy and popularity in legal academia. Comparative Law: Cases-Texts-Materials (1950), written while Schlesinger taught at Cornell University, became a staple of law school curricula and entered its fifth edition in the late 1990s. He also wrote important studies of CIVIL PROCEDURE and international business transactions and directed a ten-year international research project on contracts.

Born in Munich, Germany, in 1909, Rudolf Berthold Schlesinger fled nazism before