Redlich, Josef b.June 18, l869;Goding (Moravia), Austria-Hungary d. November 12, 1936;Vienna,Austria
Jewish Austrian jurist and politician. Redlich was a noted law professor both in Austria and in the United States, a member of the Austrian parliament, and twice Austrian finance minister.
He is known in the United States principally for a study he made in 1914 of American legal education.As a youth Redlich spent time in England. He studied law at the University of Vienna and at the universities of Leipzig and Tubingen. In 1891 the University of Vienna awarded him a doctorate of jurisprudence. In 1901 he published the work that made his academic reputation; a book on local administration in England, which he soon published in English as well. Redlich joined the faculty of the University of Vienna and became professor of administrative and constitutional law. On the eve of World War I, the Carnegie Foundation commissioned him to conduct a study of American legal education. In 1907 Redlich became a member of the Austrian parliament; for two months in October and November he was finance minister in the last government of the Habsburg monarchy.
After World War I, Redlich lectured in the United States and in 1926 joined the faculty of Harvard Law School. He became the Charles Stebbins Fairchild Professor of Comparative Public Law and in 1929 head of the newly established Harvard Institute of Comparative Law. In 1931 he was called back to Austria to again be minister of finance, but held that position for only four months. He did not return to teaching at Harvard. In 1930 Redlich was elected a deputy judge of the Permanent Court of International Justice in The Hague.
To this day Redlich is known in the United States as the author of what is regarded as the first major study of American legal education. Many contemporary readers of Redlich’s report chose to see in it a validation of the case method of instruction that had then become dominant, particularly in elite law schools.
Redlich saw strength in the case method, which he considered to be “an unrivaled method for training the American law student in independent thought and [in] the keenest powers of legal reasoning” (Redlich 1914, 52). But Redlich saw in the case method serious weaknesses, particularly in what he called its “scientific side.” For Redlich these weaknesses were both in the “scientific comprehension of law by the students” and in the “scientific elaboration of law in general [by the faculty]” (Redlich 1914, 41). Redlich’s report includes many valuable comparative insights into American law and legal education from a European civil law perspective.James R. Maxeiner
References and Further Reading
Burlingham, Charles C. “Josef Redlich.” Harvard Law Review 50 (1937): 392—394.
Frankfurter, Felix. “Josef Redlich.” Harvard Law Review 50 (1937): 389-391.
Redlich, Josef. The Case Method in American Law Schools. A Report to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Bulletin No. 8. New York: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1914.
Stevens, Robert. Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina, 1983.