Roth, Paul Rudolf

Roth, Paul Rudolf 

Born June 11, 1820, in Nuremberg; died Mar. 29, 1892, in Munich. German jurist and law historian.

Roth was a law professor at the universities of Marburg (from 1850), Rostock (from 1853), Kiel (from 1857), and Munich (from 1863). From 1874 to 1889 he was a member of the commission preparing the German Civil Code. In his studies on the origin of the feudal order in Western Europe, Roth primarily devoted his attention to feudal legal institutions, for example, benefice and immunity, and emphasized the active role of the state in the development of these institutions. He collected a great deal of factual material on the swift growth of land ownership under the Carolingians. Roth’s material on sources describing the acts of violence committed by the nobility and clergy to enserf the free members of communes was used by F. Engels in “The Frankish Period” (see K. Marx and F. Engels, Sock, 2nd ed., vol. 19, pp. 495–546).

WORKS

Geschichte des Beneficialwesens. Erlangen, 1850.
System derdeutschen Privatrechts, parts 1–3. Tubingen, 1880–86.