Baumgarten, Arthur

Born Mar. 31, 1884; died Nov. 27, 1966. German scholar, jurist, and public figure. Specialist in the philosophy of law and in criminal and international law. Professor of the universities of Cologne, Basel, and Frankfurt am Main.

In 1933, Baumgarten, an enemy of fascism, left Germany and settled in Switzerland. Under the influence of Marxism, Baumgarten gradually abandoned his bourgeois-liberal positions on the theory of law, became active in political life and in the labor movement, and was one of the founders and active members of the Swiss Labor Party.

After the defeat of fascism, Baumgarten returned to his homeland and engaged in scholarly, pedagogical, and public activity in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). In that period Baumgarten worked on problems of Marxist methodology and on the nature of socialist law, as well as on current problems of international law. He was a member of the GDR Academy of Sciences, president of the W. Ulbricht Academy of State and Legal Sciences, and editor in chief of the journal Stadt und Recht. He received the GDR National Prize in 1951.