law émigré max rheinstein (1899–1977) Mentschikoff of Chicago and Thomas R. Haggard of Rutgers. The project had Scandinavian subgroups, and in February 1968 Britt-Mari Persson Blegvad of the Institute of Organization and Sociology of Labour at Århus Business School, Denmark, wrote to introduce herself to Rheinstein and aprofessor of sociology Margaret Rosenheim and to ask whether she, Lando, and the professor of procedural law at Lund University, Per Olof Bolding (representing the Danish and Swedish part of the project) could visit Chicago as part of the project concerned with the legal and sociological aspects of arbitration. For Persson Blegvad this was the start of an intense correspondence with Rheinstein, and a long series of American exchanges. She and her husband Mogens Blegvad, the professor of philosophy at Copenhagen, spent the spring of 1970 at the University of California Santa Barbara, and combined it with a visit to Chicago. American sociology of law became one of her special scholarly interests. Another female practitioner who collaborated with Rheinstein in this period was the judge Inger Margarete Pedersen, who since 1960 had served as a judge in Københavns Byret (the District Court of Copenhagen) and in 1971–78 was a judge in the Østre Landsret (Eastern High Court of Denmark) in Copenhagen. From the late 1960s she was also a member of several committees working on the revision of Danish family law. She met Rheinstein at a conference on German family law reforms in Wiesbaden, after which she kept him up to date with Danish reforms in connection with his family law project. In 1974 she was invited to America by the US State Department, and in addition to seeing Rheinstein in Chicago she followed his suggestion that she visit a number of his colleagues. Pedersen was one of his key sources of information about Scandinavian family law reforms in the 1970s, especially for his comparative work on divorce. Alatearrival tothis extensive network was Aleksander Peczenik (1937– 2005), a Polish Jewish legal philosopher in Cracow, who in 1968 emigrated from Poland. As a law émigré he went via Austria to Sweden, his sights set on the US and Chicago: he wanted to be a comparatist and to that end he wanted to learn US law. Rheinstein became Peczenik’s mentor at a critical point, writing that he saw himself in Peczenik. He knew 271
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=