Josef Kohler

Josef Kohler ( born March 9, 1849 in Offenburg, † August 3, 1919 in Charlottenburg ) was a German lawyer.

Life

He was the son of an elementary school teacher, studied at the Universities of Heidelberg and Freiburg and received his doctorate in 1873. Both state law he passed in 1871 and 1873 with honors. A year later, he was after a short practice as a lawyer Kreisgerichtsrat in Mannheim. Due to a 1878 published basic representation of patent law, he was - without having ever qualified as a formal sense - appointed in the same year to advocacy by Bernhard Windscheid at the University of Würzburg. From there he moved in 1888 to the University of Berlin, where he became professor of civil law, commercial and criminal law, civil procedure, and legal philosophy.

Kohler researched and worked in almost every area of law. His list of publications includes about 2500 entries, including about 100 monographs. As fundamentally in particular apply his work on intellectual property - patent, trademark and copyright - and to legal history and comparative law. In addition, he was a man of arts. He wrote and composed, of course, to remain without hereby in memory.

His international reputation was excellent. In 1886 he received - then very unusual - a highly doped offer to go to Tokyo as a professor, which he refused. 1904 awarded him the University of Chicago, an honorary doctorate. The German Kaiser Wilhelm II sent him on this occasion a congratulatory telegram. When America travel associated with the adoption Kohler also met with the U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, who received him at the White House. In addition, he met the eminent American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes know.

Work

The List of Josef Kohler includes approximately 2,500 titles, and shows him to be extremely fertile and versatile scholars. His particular focus was the comparative jurisprudence, which he already uses in his early work of 1878. She led him to the ethnological observation of non-European rights, such as the cuneiform rights. Already this year, he co-founded the Journal of Comparative Law. Since 1909, he gave in addition together with Ernst Rabel out the Rheinische Journal of Civil and Procedural Law, a comparative German - French magazine.

In the field of patent law, he founded the exhaustion doctrine, under which the rights of a patent will lapse ( exhausted ) when the protected object with the consent of the patent holder was placed on the market in Germany, → Patent. His definition of the patent was transferred to the Japanese patent law nor 1959.

Based on his research of the patent law, he devoted himself to rights, where he added the hitherto purely patrimonial approach to personality rights aspects of it with the embossed term intellectual property. His doctrine prevailed against which was founded by Rudolf Klostermann on the natural law theory of intellectual property.

He devoted himself especially to the sources of law, of which he also produced critical editions. So he gave, inter alia, 1900 together with Willy Scheel, the Criminal Code Constitutio Carolina Criminalis out, but also participated in editions of Assyrian, Babylonian and ancient Greek texts.

In his later years he turned to the philosophy of law. His ideas led after thought of Hegel and Schopenhauer to a cultural studies interpretation of the law, which he took as natural law of the culture period. In 1907, he was with Fritz Berolzheimer founder of the Archives for legal and economic philosophy. Two years later he co-founded the International Association for Philosophy of Law and Economics (since 1933: International Association for Legal and Social Philosophy ).

His comprehensive overview of the jurisprudence qualified him after the death of Franz Holtzendorff editor of the revised edition of the Encyclopaedia of Law, the first time in 1904 and 1917 appeared in its second edition.

His interest in the literature on the one hand led him to legal considerations of literary works, such as of Shakespeare. But he was also self- literary and has published texts Adaptations of works by Dante Alighieri and Francesco Petrarch, but also the thoughts of Lao Tzu. In addition, he published the autobiographical novel " A fist nature." A play is also narrated from him. Finally, he also wrote a number of articles on cultural topics.

To capture an example of Kohler's efforts, legislation, court decisions and daily business practices of his time against the Begriffsjurisprudenz particular new areas of law, " construct " and to insert in the system of science of the law, his employment with the stamps is. A well- classified by him as a side business publication was his essay on post stamps from 1892, eight years before the entry into force of the Civil Code (BGB ) of 1900. This paper is practically the first comprehensive work on the legal character of the then 50 -year-old stamp, which is both the civil and the criminal law of fundamental importance. Kohler characterized the acquisition of a postage stamp than buying a bourgeois legal instrument within the meaning of any Bearer Security, the verbriefe a legal entitlement. Criminally are subject Stamps therefore the law of forgery. Josef Kohler coined so that the prevailing opinion in German legal science and practice for a whole generation. Last Kohler private law theory in the German Empire stamp of the Hamburg lawyers Oswald Lassally, later co-founder of the noise abatement law in the Federal Republic of Germany in his essay in the journal " Law Review" 1929 was represented.

The Federal Court was concerned after the privatization of the postal system in a decision in 2005 with the legal nature of the stamp, quoting Kohler's work as " fundamental " to the previous state of the law. For the legal status after the privatization of the Supreme Court defined the stamp as a bearer bond.

Others

At the Humboldt University of Berlin was founded in the spring of 2012, the Josef Kohler Institute for Intellectual Property.

Works in selection

• Studies of mental reservation and simulation. In: Yearbooks for the dogma of today's Roman and German private law. 16 = 4 NF (1878 ), p 91
• German Patent Law: systematically processed using a comparative account of the French patent law. Bensheim, Mannheim 1878.
• The author law: a treatise zivilistische; also contribute to the teaching of the property, from Miteigenthum, the legal transaction and to individuals. Reprint from yearbooks for the dogmatism of today's Roman and German private law, Vol 18 = NF 6 (1880 ) ( Diss )
• Legal research process. Müller, Berlin, 1889.
• From the Babylonian law of life. (together with Felix Peiser ). Pfeiffer, Leipzig 1890.
• Altin Dische procedure law: with an appendix: Altin Discher Eigenthumserwerb. Enke, Stuttgart 1891.
• Textbook of bankruptcy law. Enke, Stuttgart 1891.
• The literary and artistic work of art and its author protection: A juridico- aesthetic study. Bensheim, Mannheim 1892.
• The right of the Aztecs. Enke, Stuttgart 1892.
• Melusine: dramat. Seal in 3 acts. Bensheim, Mannheim, 1896.
• Commercial and maritime law and inland navigation law. Berlin 1896.
• For the prehistory of Marriage: Totemism, Group Marriage, mother-right. Enke, Stuttgart 1897.
• The criminal law of the Italian statutes of 12th - 16th century. Bensheim, Mannheim from 1890 to 1897.
• Handbook of the German patent law in comparative legal representation. J. Bensheim, Mannheim 1900.
• Free paraphrase the Divina Commedia: Dante's sacred journey. 3 volumes. Berlin / Cologne / Leipzig 1901.
• Introduction to jurisprudence. Deichert, Leipzig 1902.
• From Petrarch's sonnets Treasure: Free adaptations. G. Reimer, Berlin 1902.
• The method of the manorial court Rottweil. Weber, Berlin, 1904.
• Copyright of written works and publishing law. Stuttgart, 1907.
• Representation of Talmudic law. Berlin, 1907.
• Greatest wisdom of the East. Lao Tzu. Rothschild Berlin et al, 1908.
• From the four parts of the world: travel images. Rothschild, Berlin / Leipzig 1908.
• Law and personality in contemporary culture. , 1914.
• International Criminal Law. Enke, Stuttgart 1917.
• Foundations of international law. Stuttgart 1918.
• Shakespeare in the forum of jurisprudence. 2nd edition. Rotschild, Berlin et al 1919.
• Aequitas against res judicata. Archive for the Civilistische practice, 114 band, JCB Mohr 1916.