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[German Version] ( Jan 16, 1802, Munich – Aug 10, 1861, Brückenau), Protestant jurisprudent and politician. Stahl (orig. Jolson) was of Jewish parentage; in 1819 he converted to Lutheranism and took the name Stahl when he was baptized. In 1832 he was appointed associate professor at Erlangen and in the same year full professor at Würzburg; in 1834 he was ¶ appointed full professor at Erlangen. As representative of the university in the Bavarian Landtag, he was reprimanded on account of a conflict with the government; in 1840 he therefore accepted an appointment in Be…

[German Version] (Feb 25, 1916, Chemnitz – Mar 29, 1967, Munich) was a Protestant lawyer who studied from 1936 to 1939, received his doctorate in 1940, and, following almost a decade of military service and imprisonment in Russia, became a lawyer serving the church. He gained his Habilitation in 1956 (Munich), became professor of state and church law in Marburg in 1958/59, and professor of church and state law in Munich in 1959. Grundmann's life work was devoted especially to Protestant canon law …

[German Version] The “standard year” of the Peace of Westphalia established in 1624 as normative for religious observance. It drastically restricted the right of princes to determine the confessional allegiance ( Ius reformandi ) of their lands guaranteed in the Peace of Augsburg by ensuring that the religion practiced legally – publicly or privately – at any time during the year 1624 could continue in that form in the future ( Instrumentum pacis osnabrugense art. V, §§32ff.). Church property was to remain in the hands of whoever held it on the “standard day” ( dies normalis; art. V, §2),…

[German Version] (“it pleases”; also placetum regium, exequatur regium) is the formula expressing assent by the local prince to ecclesiastical legislation, especially papal legislation. It was both a requirement before the law could take effect in the ruler’s territory and authorization to promulgate it (Publication). First put into practice in England and in French Gallicanism, it was introduced after the 17th century in many countries of western and southern Europe. In the German Empire, initially onl…

[German Version] (Reinkingk, since 1650: v. Reinking; Mar 10, 1590, Windau, Courland [today Ventspils, Latvia] – Dec 15, 1664, Glückstadt), outstanding Lutheran politician and scholar of constitutional law. After occupying a chair at Giessen, from 1618 he held high offices of state in Hesse-Darmstadt, Mecklenburg, archepiscopal Bremen (representing the archdiocese at the 1648 peace negotiations in Osnabrück), and Denmark. His most important academic work, Tractatus de regimine seculari et ecclesiastico (1619, 71717), characterizes the Empire as a monarchy of the em…

[German Version] In the Holy Roman Empire, reserved rights were the epitome of the (historically varying) rights enjoyed by the emperor without any requirement of approval by electors and the Reichstag. Borrowing from this usage, in the 19th century Reservatsrechte were those rights of church governance, rooted in the summepiscopate of the territorial prince, that he had reserved to be exercised personally (i.e. not by church officials acting in his name). The most important were: approbation of ecclesiastical legislation passed by synods, in ¶ some cases including the right to…

[German Version] I. From the very beginning, the church has always existed on the basis of communication. All human lives spent within it are realized in the communicative justification of human community. In all periods, therefore, it has placed every available means of communication in the service of its mission. The modern transition to an information-based society, however, represents a particular challenge. In many episcopal and papal statements going back as far as…

[German Version] (Huig de Groot; Apr 10, 1583, Delft, The Netherlands – Aug 28, 1645, Rostock), an impor-¶ tant jurist and theologian. From a patrician Delft family, Grotius attended the University of Leiden already as an eleven-year-old. After studying classical philology, history, theology, and law, he received the Dr.iur. in Orléans on an ambassadorial journey in 1598 and became a lawyer in 1599. An expert's opinion in the conflict of the sea-trade interests of Holland and Portugal contained the pioneering chapter De mare libero (1604; ET: The Free Sea, 2004), in which Grotius j…

[German Version] I As one type of relationship between church and state, a state church is a church incorporated into the state in such a way that it appears to be a state institution. As a result, the state not only has the right to intervene in the internal governance of the church (staffing, deciding doctrinal conflicts, disposition of church property, etc.; Church polity) but also may use the church for state purposes. 1 The history of state churches began when Theodosius I made the Christian church the only recognized church of the Roman Empire ( Reichskirche). In East Rome, a sacral …

[German Version] At the request of the liberal Bavarian minister of culture Johannes v. Lutz (1826–1890), §130a, the Kanzelparagraph, was included in the German criminal code by a law of Dec 10, 1871, part of the legislation enacted during the Kulturkampf. It threatened the clergy, with other official religious leaders, with up to two years imprisonment if they discussed state matters in public or in their preaching and threatened the public order. A law of Feb 28, 1872, extended the statutory offense to include dissemination of similar ideas in writing. During the Kirchenkampf (Nation…

[German Version] (Apr 23, 1827, Winterberg, Westphalia – Dec 19, 1914, Obermais, near Meran), Catholic canonist and legal historian. He was appointed associate professor in Prague in 1854, full professor in 1855; from 1873 to 1906, he taught as a professor in Bonn. Although originally closely tied to the Catholic Church, in 1870 he became one of the most prominent critics of the dogma of papal infallibility and – with J. v. Döllinger – a leading organizer of the Old Catholic movement (Old Catholic…

[German Version] denotes the equal status in law of religious communities in the state; it therefore presupposes the dissolution of confessional homogeneity within the state. Parity had been practiced earlier, but in Germany it first gained legal form through the (still limited) equality granted to the Catholic and Protestant parties, particularly in the Peace of Augsburg. It gained an explicit basis in constitutional law in the Peace of Westphalia as aequalitas exacta mutuaque (“complete and mutual equality”). At the same time, the previously excluded Reformed beli…

[German Version] I. In international law, neutrality is the legal status of a state that is not participating in a war involving other states. This status carries various rights (e.g. territorial integrity, armed resistance to violations of neutrality) and duties (esp. no military, financial, or other support of any belligerent, sufficient military potential to defend against attacks in peacetime, willingness to allow ships on the high seas to be searched by belligerents, and equal treatment of the…

[German Version] The term Constantinian Era is a headword known more in the context of “the end of the Constantinian Era” (Constantine the Great) than as a period delimited by precise historical criteria and is supposed to characterize the symbiosis of church and secular authority that began with the “Constantinian change” (312) and lasted into the modern era, indeed into recent history. It is meant to refer to an alliance in which each side uses the services of the other to reach its ¶ goals: the church uses the state for recourse to secular force and privileges; the st…

[German Version] (May 27, 1818, Zellerfeld – Dec 25, 1893, Hanover), Protestant teacher of constitutional and church law. After studying law in Göttingen, Berlin and Jena, Mejer obtained his doctorate in 1841 in Göttingen; he became a lecturer there in 1842, and a full professor at Königsberg in 1847, Greifswald in 1850, Rostock in 1851, and finally Göttingen from 1874 to 1885, after which he was president of the Hanover Evangelical Lutheran regional consistory until his death. As a pupil of A.L. …

[German Version] (Dec 20, 1837, Konitz, Western Prussia – Sep 7, 1910, Leipzig), (Protestant) jurist who became associate professor at the University of Halle in 1865, followed by Freiburg in 1868; from 1869, he was full professor at Leipzig. Deeply committed to the Hegelian idea of the state (G.W.F. Hegel), Friedberg belonged to the most prominent “state canonists” who sided with the state in the Kulturkampf . Although Friedberg sought to legitimate his position from a scientific-historical standpoint, his evaluation of the medieval conflic…

[German Version] (Mar 27, 1857, Urach – Nov 28, 1927, Erlangen), Protestant jurist. After studying theology and philosophy, Rieker first worked for the church. He then studied law in Leipzig, where he gained a doctorate and Habilitation in 1891. In 1893 he was appointed assistant professor, and from 1903 full professor of public law and history of law, in Erlangen. In his main work on the legal position of the Protestant Church in Germany, Rieker essentially seeks to prove that the synodal and presbyterial principles have no basis…

[German Version] I. Protestantism – II. Catholicism I. Protestantism In the 16th and 17th century (before territorialism and collegialism), episcopalism and the theory of the episcopal system developed by its proponents represented the earliest justification of the ecclesiastical authority wielded by Protestant princes in their realms. 1. While the Reformers regarded these local rulers as mere fellow Christians, albeit as praecipuum membrum ecclesiae, and wished to invest them with this authority only as long as seemed necessa…

[German Version] (May 16, 1867, Königsberg [Kaliningrad] – Sep 21, 1941, Göttingen), Protestant jurisprudent. He was appointed associate professor at Jena in 1896 and a full professor in 1900; in the same year he was appointed to a full professorship in Göttingen. Besides numerous works on public law, he wrote a major two-volume Das evangelische Kirchenrecht in Preußen (1903–1910, repr. 1967), discussing church law in Prussia without reference to its theological dimension or ecclesiastical politics, developing instead its parallelism with state and co…

[German Version] (Feb 15, 1808, Stolpen – May 8, 1864, Berlin), Protestant teacher of church law. In 1835 Richter became assistant professor in Leipzig, in 1838 full professor in Marburg, and from 1846 in Berlin; he was a member of the Protestant High Consistory between 1850 and 1859, and thereafter senior privy councilor in the Prussian ministry of culture. Together with K.F. Eichhorn, Richter is regarded as one of the founders of the church law branch of the history of law school. When he was only 31, he published a new critical edition of the Corpus iuris canonici. Alongside numerous oth…