part v • comparative legal history • kjell å modéer oriented way of legal thinking’.16 From this perspective, comparative law complied with the modern jurists. It was the younger generation of German law clerks, with Ernst Rabel as their mentor, who were particularly schooled in this methodology, and which paved the way for Anglo-American jurisdiction and the innovation of legal realism (the legal avantgarde). The American legal scholar Karl Llewellyn was one of the international scholars who visited the institute in Berlin Palace. Looking back after war, Rheinstein said of the Weimar Republic that it had been ‘a great time, a creative period in all fields, in science, in the arts, on the stage, in the movies, in literature in social politics, in homebuilding for the working classes, in architecture, in industry, and in trade. It was “eine Lust zu leben” – until the Depression struck.’17 In the spring of 1931 Rheinstein defended his Habilitationsarbeit at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin on the structure of the contractual debt in Anglo-American law – ‘Die Struktur des vertraglichen Schuldverhältnisses imanglo-amerikanischen Recht’ – a pioneering work in international private law. It opened the door to his academic career. Then whenHitler came to power Rheinstein’s life changed dramatically. Being Jewish, in July 1933 he was sacked by the institute and he was deprived of his university lectureship. His methodological training was his salvation because it gave him a chance at acareer in theUS. In 1933 the Rockefeller Foundation gave him a grant for a year, and this was soon followed by positions first at Columbia and then at Harvard Law School. His wife Elisabeth (Lilly) and their son John followed him into exile. Within a couple of years he was offered a position as avisiting professor at the University of Chicago Law School. The faculty, noting his skill, they offered him a chair, the Max Pam Professorship of Comparative Law, the same year. He held this position until he retired in 1972, 35 years later. During the Second World War he closely followed political and legal life in Germany, and gave lectures on legal proceedings in the Third Reich – but now from an outsid16 Rheinstein 1967, 6 ff: ‘die Wandlung von einem gesetzesorientierten zu einem problemorientierten Rechtsdenken’. 17 UChicago, SCRC, Max Rheinstein Papers, Box 4, Folder 3, Brief an deutsche Jugend 1946. 260
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