The Viennese Faculty of Law and State 1918-1938

The project herewith presented aims to describe the development of the Faculty of Law and State of the University of Vienna in the time of the First Republic (democratic period 1918-33 and authoritarian regime 1933-38), not only from the aspect of scientific history, but also social history. The first item will include the examination of the prevailing methodical trends and the diverting subject-specific controversies between the faculty members, the formation of a separate discipline of political sciences as well as the integration of legal and political sciences into the scientific frame of this epoch, e.g. contacts to the Vienna Circle ("Wiener Kreis"). The second item will include the consequences of the collapse of the monarchy for the personnel structure of the faculty, admission of women to studies of law (in 1919), the significance of Jewish professors and students, but also anti-Semitism, for the events within the university and finally the part of the faculty in the political struggles of the First Republic. It is the conviction of the applicant that both aspects, the social-historical and the scientific-historical, are inseparably interwoven and the one cannot be sufficiently understood without considering the other. The particularity of this investigation project is its decidedly interdisciplinary approach: History of science will be seen in nearly all aspects of legal, political and economical disciplines. An essential difficulty lies in the fact that the archive of the University of Vienna has been badly damaged during World War II and that the fund of the Law Faculty is completely destroyed. But there will be complementary files at the archive of the University and also at the Austrian State Archive. Supports requested by the FWF are personnel costs for a half-a-day post-doc- collaborator and a full pre-doc-collaborator and also travel costs to archives of other universities. The project was suggested in the course of the current works on the FWF investigation project "Biographical Researches on Hans Kelsen in the Years 1881-1940" (FWF-project No P19287-G 14), the results of the first project will considerably shape the elaboration of the second one and vice versa. The project partners of the existing project, especially the Commission for Legal History of the Austrian Academy of Sciences will cooperate also with the new project. New cooperation partners will be the archive of the University of Vienna, where most of the investigations will take place, and also the Law Faculty of the Charles University in Prague.

Till 1918 the Faculty of Law and State of the University of Vienna was not only one of the largest but also most respected schools worldwide. Its international fame was caused especially by the Austrian school of Economics and also by the Vienna School of Legal Theory. The collapse of the monarchy in 1918, which destroyed traditional academic career paths (romanisation of the University of Chernivtsi etc.), the economic crisis and the consequent poor payment of university teachers, but especially the increasingly rough political and ideological climate had a negative impact on the development of the faculty. Of central importance was the role of anti-Semitism, which had had a long tradition at the University of Vienna. During the described period (19181938), it had influence both on habilitations as on appointments of professors as well as on other developments. This is important as the racial and political hostilities were often dressed in the garb of scientific controversies and so the anti-Semitism played a major and fatal role in the scientific development of the faculty. But also the opposite could happen: scientific controversies could turn into personal enmities. In this context it should be emphasized that there were no less than 17 disciplinary proceedings against faculty members between 1918 and 1938. Nonetheless, some faculty members generated considerable scientific achievements in the various regions; most notable is the theory of the hierarchical structure of the legal order, developed by Adolf J. Merkl and adopted by Hans Kelsen into his Pure Theory of Law. This theory postulated a purity of juristic methods which was in sharp contrast to other schools at the faculty who wanted to combine the dogmatic theory with the associated empirical sciences, as was done for example in the University Institute of Criminological Sciences and Criminalistics, founded in 1923 by Wenzel Gleispach. The introduction of a separate course of studies of political sciences in 1919 completed a year-long discussion that was closely associated with a parallel discussion on the admission of women to the law degree programme, which happened in 1919, too. In the literature, it is frequently stated that the study programme of political sciences was a womens degree. But the present project rebuts this with statistical data. However, another statement is true: That the study programme of political sciences attracted foreign students to a greater extent. This is connected with the fact that the law degree programme was strongly oriented to the practical needs of the Austrian justice. The law degree regulations came from 1893 and were replaced by new ones in 1935. These new regulations revealed the ideology of the Authoritarian Corporate State in several respects. When this dictatorship was established in 1933/34, some of the professors had to leave the university and even more had to do so in 1938. This, together with a brain drain, which had already started soon after 1918, led to an irreversible loss of the facultys scientific standard.