Edgar Bodenheimer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Bodenheimer

In 2016, Rosemarie Bodenheimer wrote a book about her parents, called Edgar and Brigitte: A German Jewish Passage to America It chronicles their life and has many photos. Available from http://ow.ly/Ykw4305sbzA

• http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=40182425
• http://www.jstor.org/pss/840736

Books:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%...

Edgar Bodenheimer was born in Berlin in 1908. He was educated in universities of Geneva, Munich, Heidelberg, and Berlin. After receiving his J.U.D. from the University of Heidelberg in 1933, he emigrated to the United States to escape from the Nazis. He then got his LL.B. from the University of Washington in 1937.[1]

His career started in 1940 as an Attorney for the U.S. Department of Labor, where he worked for two years before taking on the Principal Attorney position at the Office of Alien Property Custodian in Washington D.C.

In 1945, Edgar served in the Office of Chief of Counsel for the prosecution of Axis Criminality at the Nuremberg Trials,[2] utilizing his degrees in both American and German law.

He joined the law faculty of the University of Utah in 1946, and became a professor at the Law School of University of California, Davis in 1966. Retiring in 1975, he continued writing and lecturing at UC Davis as Professor Emeritus until his death in 1991

Works by Edgar Bodenhimer have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese.[3]

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Edgar Bodenheimer, Law: Davis

1908-1991

Professor Emeritus

The life and career of a gentle and kind man ended in Davis on May 30, 1991, when Edgar Bodenheimer died following a brief illness. Born 83 years earlier in a Germany that proved neither gentle nor kind, Edgar devoted his professional life to understanding the place of law in the scheme of things. What was the role of law in people's individual lives and in the life of society? How was one to understand the many unrighteous things done in the name of the law, and how was one to gauge whether a proposed law, or a legal system, was fair and just? For Edgar, these were burning questions--a search for guidance in addressing major issues of our times.

Beneath his quiet demeanor, his dignity and his serious view of life, lay Edgar's delightful sense of humor, displayed not infrequently by a casual remark and a twinkling eye. An eminent jurisprudential scholar, he had a tolerance for ideas and conclusions he did not share and a willingness to reexamine his own. But he also had the intellectual and moral courage, when others pursued more popular and less normative views of legal philosophy, to stand by the basic truths as he saw them. While he was one of the few brave souls of his day to embrace the idea of natural law--some essential aspect of human nature that shapes our sense of justice--he defied classification as either conservative or traditional. His exquisitely modern mind was fascinated with scientific developments in fields as diverse as physics, biology and psychology, because these held clues of understanding our individual and collective behavior and goals.

Born in Berlin on March 4, 1908, the son of Siegmund and Rosi Bodenheimer, Edgar received his continental education in law and political science at the universities of Geneva, Munich, Heidelberg and Berlin. But in 1933, the year he earned his J.U.D. from Heidelberg

and published his thesis, National Socialism cost Edgar his legal apprenticeship and promoted his emigration to the United States.

While working for a New York law firm and taking night courses at N.Y.U., he spotted an acquaintance from Heidelberg in the Columbia University law library. Brigitte Levy, who had also emigrated, was studying law at Columbia. The couple married in 1935 and moved to Seattle, where Brigitte, who was later to become a distinguished member of the Utah and Davis law faculties in her own right, received a law degree in 1936. Edgar completed his American law degree in 1937, followed two years later by a B.A. in law librarianship. He also wrote the first edition of his most famous work, originally published in 1940 as Jurisprudence.

Naturalized in 1939, Edgar became a member of the bar. As an attorney in Washington, D.C., he worked first for the U.S. Department of Labor, then served as Principal Attorney in the Division of Patent Administration of the Office of Alien Property Custodian. During the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials in 1945 he helped prepare the prosecution's brief as a member of Justice Jackson's Office of the Chief Counsel. The jurisprudential issues he confronted there later became the topic of lectures that fascinated several generations of law students.

In 1946 Edgar joined the law faculty of the University of Utah and exactly 20 years later he became a member of Davis' founding law faculty.

In Davis, as in Salt Lake, the Bodenheimers became--in a Utah colleague's words--”a bridge to the classical education of Europe, the intellectual life of the world, and the cultural life of fine music and great books.” They also hiked, skied, and walked, doubtlessly contributing to the fine physical health Edgar always enjoyed.

A devoted and memorable teacher, over the years Edgar taught many subjects: jurisprudence, international law, legal history, unfair trade practices, the conflict of laws, and equity. He also devised an introduction to law course, later coauthoring the published text. Much in demand, he visited at Heidelberg, Freiburg, Texas, Southern California and Princeton. Even after assuming emeritus status in 1975, he taught at the law school and the graduate school of management at Davis.

His true love and the basis for his fame, however, was jurisprudence, a subject to which he dedicated four books and most of his numerous articles. His enduring work, Jurisprudence, later appeared in two extensively revised editions as Jurisprudence: The Philosophy and Method of the Law, and was also published in three foreign languages.

Its most recent translation was in 1987, when the Chinese government chose it as a text for students and scholars in that country. His other jurisprudential books are Treatise on Justice (1967), Power, Law and Society (1973), and Philosophy of Responsibility (1980). Quite literally, Edgar never stopped writing, having published an important article on Hegel just weeks before his death.

An Honorary Member of Phi Kappa Phi and the Order of the Coif, Edgar served as a Vice President of the American Society of Political and Legal Philosophy, as a Director of the American Society of Comparative Law, and as a member of the Board of Editors of the American Journal of Comparative Law. He was a good citizen of the law school and University, too, serving both in numerous capacities.

Edgar was blessed with two happy marriages. There were three children of his marriage to Brigitte M. (Levy) Bodenheimer: Peter, a physics professor at UC Santa Cruz, Thomas, a San Francisco physician, and Rosemarie, an English professor at Boston College. Brigitte M. Bodenheimer, whose life is warmly recalled in the 1985 In Memoriam volume, predeceased him in 1981. In 1982, Edgar married his second wife, the gracious Brigitte Hirschfeld Bodenheimer, also a native of Berlin. She survives him, as do his children and three grand children.

Unassuming despite his eminence, Edgar was equally beloved by his family, his students and his colleagues. “The living embodiment of the scholarly ideal,” as a colleague called him, Edgar's life long commitment, in word and deed, was to law in a civilized society. He will be missed.