Professor Dr. Filippo Ranieri

February 26, 2020

Professor Dr. Filippo Ranieri, a former researcher here at the Institute, died suddenly on 14 February 2020. Upon joining the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History as a researcher (starting in 1974), he was a very committed researcher in the field of European private legal history. His work on the handbook edited by Coing dealt with Italian legislation. He attempted to make use of and apply the quantitative assessment and interpretation of sources as a mass phenomenon favoured by historians in the 1970s for legal texts. To this end, the MPIeR made the roughly 60,000 legal dissertations in its extensive collection available. With the help of the IT department, he created databases on the 'Legal Dissertations of German Universities' and 'Lawyers from the Old Empire' together with different working groups. He also used this material to compile 'indexes' on language and concept formation in the 'Usus modernus Pandectarum'. Even though the project remained unfinished, it nevertheless made it possible to make important assertions about the legal culture of the German Ancien Régime. In the same vein, as a postdoctoral fellow (Habilitand) of Prof. Bernhard Diestelkamp (University of Frankfurt), he examined the numerous records of the Imperial Chamber Court as sources for an inventory of the application of law and the social reality in period known as the reception of Roman law. After habilitating in 1984, Rechtsprechung remained one of Ranieri's primary research interests, as evidenced by the repertory of the printed collections of the administration of justice by all the European states (1800-1945) which he edited and was compiled by a large group of researchers.

He left the Institute in 1992 to accept a professorship at the University of Rostock, and in 1995, he went to the University of the Saarland. His publications on the 'European lawyer', legal training or the 'European Code of Obligations' attest to the conceptual and scholarly foundations he acquired while at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History. European legal history has lost a committed and fervent researcher.

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