part v • comparative legal history • kjell å modéer ing member of the German-based Gesellschaft für Rechtsvergleichung (GermanAssociation for Comparative Law) founded in 1950, and regularly attended its conferences. So, in the post-war period there were important meeting points for German, Nordic, and American jurists. They formed an important network for the circulation of knowledge and the internationalization of the law in the European nation-states. For Rheinstein, with his roots, identity, and old networks in Germany, it was important to introduce German scholarship to the English-speaking world. I want to focus on two examples: Paul Koschaker and Max Weber. In 1947 Paul Koschaker, professor of Roman law, published his classic workEuropa und das römische Recht.29 In the post-war period it was an important contribution to the restoration of the Roman law, which in the Nazi era ‘came to a standstill in Germany’. Rheinstein recommended it be translated into English and explained the situation in a letter to the dean of Louisiana State University Law School. ‘Koschaker found himself in a state of involuntarily retirement. He utilized this occasion for answering the National Socialists’ pseudo-scientific statements about Roman law, as well as for an attack on the entire philosophy of exaggerated nationalism and a denial of all utility of Western civilization.’30 Rheinstein emphasized the importance of this work: ‘Koschaker starts out with a powerful assertion of the cultural unity of Western civilization inwhich the various nations such as the German, the French, the English or other, have been playing important parts, without constituting, however, civilization of their own. …Roman law is found to constitute one of the most important unifying factors.’ Those beliefs stayed with Koschaker from the collapse of the field of Roman law in the early 1930s until his death. The presentation of Roman law as a universal law sat well 29 Paul Koschaker, Europa und das römische Recht (Munich: Biederstein, 1947). 30 UChicago, SCRC, Max Rheinstein Papers, MRto Dekan Paul M. Hebert, 22 Oct. 1949. 264 Chicago
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