Stephan Kuttner

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Stephan George Kuttner (March 24, 1907 – August 12, 1996), an expert in Canon Law, was recognized as a leader in the discovery, interpretation and analysis of important texts and manuscripts that are key to understanding the evolution of legal systems from Roman law to modern Constitutional law.

1 Biography
2 Works
- 2.1 =
3 Books
4 External links

[edit] Biography

Born in Bonn, Germany, into a family of Jewish ancestry, Kuttner was raised as a Lutheran and converted to Roman Catholicism as a young man. He received his law degree from Berlin University in 1931. Two years later he fled Nazi Germany for Italy, where he worked as a research fellow at the Vatican Library and taught at the Lateran University in Rome. In 1940, he emigrated to the U.S. with his young family. He was a professor at Washington, D.C.'s Catholic University of America from 1940 to 1964, where a chair in canon law is named in his honor. At Yale University he was the first occupant of the T. Lawrason Riggs Chair of Catholic Studies, which he held for five years. Thereafter he became the first Director of the Robbins Collection in Roman and Canon Law in the Law School of the University of California at Berkeley (1970-1988), and continued as Emeritus Professor of Law until his death.

Kuttner had a large family and at the time of his death was survived by his wife, Eva (nee Illch), eight of nine children, twenty grandchildren, 14 great grandchildren and a sister. Eva Kuttner died on November 14, 2007.

[edit] Works

To organize the field of textual scholarship in medieval canon law he founded the Institute of Medieval Canon Law in 1955, which he presided over for 25 years and which now is affiliated to the University of Munich and bears his name. He also launched a series of international congresses in medieval canon law, the tenth of which was in session at the time of his death. He was appointed by Pope Paul VI to serve on the initial Commission for the Reform of the Code of Canon Law. Kutter also founded the publishing series Monumenta Iuris Canonici and the journal Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law. the latter first appeared in the journal Traditio before becoming an independent journal.

The author of many scholarly works, Kuttner received numerous academic awards and honors in the U.S. and abroad. He held honorary degrees from Cambridge, Paris, Bologna and Salamanca universities and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. Kuttner was recognized for his life's work by his 1969 induction into the prestigious Order Pour le Mérite, Germany's highest honor to bestow on artists, scholars, and scientists.

The library of the Stephan Kuttner Institute of Medieval Canon Law has Kuttner's extensive Collection of scholarly off-prints as well as his scholarly correspondence. A data base of these titles is now available at the Institute. In the future the database might be accessible on the Internet.

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"He moved to Rome in 1933, , when his position at the Alexander-Humboldt university was canceled  because of his Jewish descent; Pope Paul appointed  him Research Assopciate in the Vatican Library in charge of preparing comprehenisve `corpus glassarum' of medieval canon law. He remained in Rome until 1940, when after Mussolini signed the repatriatioon agreement with Hittler [GET EXACT NAME} he, his wife and children faced deportation to a concentration camp. He fled to Portugal, soon joined with the assistance of church officials by his wife and three children, on Vatican passports.

He was able to enter America in 1940 on being offered a post as Visiting

Professor   at Catholic Univ. washington DC, an appointment mediated
by xxx [SAY WHO IS OUR ANGEL.]; in 1942 he became a permanent
Professor of teh History of Canon Law.

SGK, from that post, engaged with the living Catholic Church as much
as with the historical one.  his students CU students became
Archshops, archbishops, cardinals [Tierney quotes, as he served on
the Ponitifcal Commission for the Revision of the Code of Canon Law
initiated in [19xxx]. He embraced the parctice of secular law too:
[something on that proposal to work best of English Common Law into
church law], and his friends and intellectual partners counted men
like John Noonan (who recruited him to Boalt) who were both
practicing judges and church law advisors and historians. In
1964after nearly a quarter-century at CU  he accepted Yale's offer
(PUT DATA), to take up the first T Lawrason Riggs Professorship of
Roman Catholic Law. On his retirment in 1970 In 1970 he embarked on
another adventure, moving further west, to Berkeley. XXRobbins had in
1952 endowed Boalt Law School at UC Berkely [link http://
www.law.berkeley.edu/robbins/overview_collection.html], one of the
world's oustanding research libraries in the history of law of all
kinds (Roman, Greek and Anglican churches, Jewish, Islamic and
secular law). As he retired from Yale SGK enthusiastically took up
the invitation to grow the still young library's collections,
including its ca. 2,800 pre-16th-c. books, and grow its active
research profile as he did by shifting there the Institute of medieval Canon Law.

"He formed close friendships anywhere he lived, at every phase of his

life [unusual that], with scholar-teachers who themselves did much to
shape their own disciplines as scholars, teachers, leaders, across
history, religious history, and also (ahead of his time in
interdisciplinarity) art and archaeology; and at every phase too he
distinctively made lasting friends of his juniors, his own students
or others', across Europe, the UK, the Americas. All memorials speak
of the affection, not just respect, he inspired throughout his
working life in students and collaborators. All his enterpises show
his devotion to internationalism, grounded just as much in his very
firm belief in the energetic talents in his second country, as in in
the wish to have the nationally autonous research systems of his
native Europe embrace exchange, in a transnational (now
transcontinental) community like that of the Latin-speaking culture
of the Middle Ages.

 From Rome onwards, among the then-young refugees who ate Eva

Kuttner's cooking, Ernst Kitzinger (Byzantine art history) and his

wife Susan, and Richard Krautheimer (wiki), the man who laid the
foundations for early Christian architectural history, Gerhart
Ladner, poet and medieval art historian,  [SGK's middle name!] [there
is a touching appreciation at http://www.jstor.org/view/0003049x/
ap030553/03a00120/0

Giles Constable, an intimate from the many years in Washington D.C.
Jaroslav Pelikan, his Yale colleague, a foundational scholar of
medieval and later Christianity who himself branched into political
and legal theory. I know from SGK himself. Alas, died. Links: http://
yalepress.typepad.com/yalepresslog/2006/05/in_memoriam_jar.html
Eva's school friends (a circle that in diaspora stubbornly kept
touch) brought him collegial and personal friendships too, like that
so important at Berkeley with the historian Paul Alexander.

At the Institute of Medieval Canon Law SGK was much more than a

research director; the Institute made strong efforts to serve younger people from around Europe and America [this is important, guys: in those days, as too often now, the poohbah institutes go for senior poohbahs]. Leading fellows to coffee at the cafe opposite the Boalt Law School, to dinner at Eva's table in the house in the hills, were the warm social matrix for the intense historical practice at the Institute. "