Marie Theres Fögen

Marie Theres Fögen ( born October 10, 1946 in Luedinghausen; † January 18, 2008 in Zurich ) was a German jurist and legal historian. She taught Roman law at the University of Zurich and was director of the Frankfurter Max Planck Institute for European Legal History.

Curriculum vitae

Marie Theres Fögen studied law at the universities of Munich and Frankfurt. In 1970, she graduated in the First State Exam. In 1973 she received her doctorate in Frankfurt as a student of Dieter Simon work The battle for the court public. 1975 put Fögen from the Second State Examination. She was then admitted to the bar and at the same time remained scientifically active. At first she was five years assistant Simons at the University of Frankfurt and worked in a research project funded by the DFG with the Byzantine legal history. Between 1980 and 1995 she continued her research as a research assistant at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt. From 1980 to 1994 Fögen taught as a part-time lecturer in addition to residential and business law at the EBS University of Economics and Law in Oestrich angle.

In 1993, Marie Theres Fögen habilitation at the Faculty of Law at the University of Frankfurt with a work to prohibit the activities of soothsayers and astrologers in the late ancient Roman Empire. Fögen suggested this ban as a measure to defend the " imperial monopoly on knowledge " ( the subtitle of the book published in 1993 ). The emperor therefore prohibited the activities of soothsayers and astrologers in order to control the circulating in the kingdom of ideas and worldviews better.

Two years after her habilitation was Marietheres Fögen Professor of Roman Law, and Comparative Law in Zurich. In 2001 she was also appointed by the Max Planck Society as a director at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt. Both offices as Zurich High School teacher and Frankfurt Institute director, she fulfilled simultaneously with an impressive commitment. In the fall of 2007, she announced her resignation as a director at the Max Planck Institute for health reasons on 31 March 2008. Your professorship in Zurich kept Marietheres Fögen in until her death in January 2008.

Marie Theres Fögen completed research at the University of Vienna (1979 /80) and at the Research Library of Dumbarton Oaks, Washington DC (1993 ), as well as a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and at the Department of History at Harvard University (1995).

Scientific work

The focus of the research of Marie Theres Fögen lay in the Roman and Byzantine legal history. They also discussed in numerous studies with the history of science of law.

Fögen turned against the popular notion of the knowledge of Roman law immediate practical applications could be obtained for the present civil law. Your thinking contradicts an idea of ​​the history of law as organic, certain internal laws following development. Instead of a logical, logically evolving Roman legal history they wanted many " Roman law stories " (the title of a book of 2002, which caused a great stir and was translated into several languages) tell. For Fögen a scientific examination of the Roman law in the way was possible that its history can be understood as " evolution of a social system ". The idea of ​​the dogma of Roman law could be extrapolated to the present and the view that the Roman law could be the basis for a new common European Ius Commune, she doubted.

Marie Theres Fögen to stimulate research on the legal history with interesting ideas as a scientific writer and provoke understand.

In his obituary writes Jürgen Kaube (FAZ ) in Frankfurt Marie Theres Fögen was " for the student of the Byzantinists Dieter Simon, whose polemical and scholarly style Ideal she used in many reviews that took no prisoners " At the end it says:. "European Legal History has one of its most original and sharpest minds lost. "

After Uwe Justus Wenzel ( NZZ) she managed to connect " scholarship, philological meticulousness and risk-averse interpretation"; he appreciates Marietheres Fögen as " a wonderful scientist, a gifted University teacher and a brilliant writer ."

Writings

• The battle to court public. Berlin 1974, ISBN 3-428-03034-6.
• The expropriation of the soothsayers. Frankfurt am Main, 1993. ISBN 3-518-58155-4.
• Roman law stories. Göttingen 2002, ISBN 3-525-36269-2.
• Legal history - history of the evolution of a social system, in: History of Law 1 (2002 ), pp. 14-19, ISBN 978-3-465-04025-5. online
• The Song of the law. Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-938593-07-3.
• Opuscula. Zurich in 2009, posthumously ed. by Andrea Büchler, ISBN 978-3-03751-149-7.