Heinz Aemisegger (born 1947) studied law at the University of Zurich, was admitted to the bar in Schaffhausen in 1972 and received his doctorate from the University of Zurich in 1975. After working as a legal assistant for the Swiss Association for Regional Planning, he served as justice on the High Court of the Canton of Schaffhausen from 1975 to 1987, and as part-time judge at the Federal Supreme Court from 1984 to 1987. From 1987 to 2014 he was a member of the Federal Supreme Court, which he presided over from 2003 to 2004. Since resigning as federal judge he has been a legal consultant for a major law firm. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Zurich in 2014. In his work on the bench and a legal theorist he focused in part on addressing spatially related matters (spatial planning, building law, environmental protection, etc.).
Category Archives: Biographies of Authors – Americanization
Peter Böckli
Peter Böckli, J.S.D. at University of Basel (1960); Bar Exam (1962). He worked as an attorney-at-law at the law firm White & Case in New York and Paris from 1963 to 1966, as a lawyer in Basel from 1966, a partner in the law offices of Böckli Bodmer & Partners (from 1981) with the main focus on company law, capital markets law, Corporate Governance, contracts and corporate taxation.
Blaise Cendrars
Frédéric-Louis Sauser (September 1, 1887 – January 21, 1961), better known as Blaise Cendrars, was a Swiss novelist and poet who became a naturalized French citizen in 1916. He was a writer of considerable influence in the European modernist movement.
Thomas Cottier, Editor and Author
Thomas Cottier, former Managing Director of the World Trade Institute and the Institute of European and International Economic Law, is a Professor emeritus of European and International Economic Law at the University of Bern. He was educated at the University of Bern and was a research fellow with Professor Jörg Paul Müller in constitutional and public international law.
Gordon A. Craig
Gordon Alexander Craig (November 13, 1913 – October 30, 2005) was a Scottish-American historian of German history and of diplomatic history.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville was born in Paris on 29th July 1805. Tocqueville’s father was a royalist prefect from Normandy who supported the Bourbon monarchy, his great-grandfather was a liberal aristocrat killed in the French Revolution, and his mother was a devout Roman Catholic who strongly advocated a return of the Old Regime.
Alan Dershowiz
Alan Morton Dershowitz (born September 1, 1938) is an American lawyer, jurist, and political commentator. He is a prominent scholar on United States constitutional law and criminal law. He has spent most of his career at Harvard Law School where in 1967, at the age of 28, he became the youngest full professor of law in its history. He has held the Felix Frankfurter professorship there since 1993.
Karl W. Deutsch
Karl Wolfgang Deutsch born in 1912 was a Czech social and political scientist from a German-speaking family. He studied Law at the German University at Prague, where he graduated in 1934.
Jens Drolshammer, Editor and Author
Jens Drolshammer was born in Switzerland in 1944 as a Swiss citizen of Norwegian and German descent. He studied Law at the University of Zurich (1964-1968). He studied in the Année d’Etudes Supérieures, University of Geneva, at the Institute for International Affairs of the University of Geneva and the Hague Academy of International Law (1969-1970).
Stuart Eizenstat
Stuart Eizenstat was born on the 15th January 1943. He is a partner at Washington, D.C. law firm, Covington & Burling and senior strategist at APCO Worldwide.
Daniel Frei
Prof. Dr. Daniel Frei was a native of Diepoldsau, St Gallen, Switzerland, where he was born in 1940. He studied history at the University of Zurich, where he got his PhD in 1964 with his doctorate thesis on “The promotion of Swiss national consciousness after the collapse of the Old Swiss Confederation in 1798”.
Albert Gallatin
Albert Gallatin was born in Geneva on the 29th of January 1761 and died in Astoria, USA, on the 12th of August 1849. He was the US Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, as well as a diplomat, banker, and ethnologist. We cite the lively portrait in Benedict von Tscharner in Inter Gentes, Statesmen, Diplomats, Political Thinkers, p. 125 ff.
Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould (September 10, 1941 – May 20, 2002) was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation. Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In the later years of his life, Gould also taught biology and evolution at New York University.
Alexander Hamilton
Alexander Hamilton (January 11, 1755 or 1757 – July 12, 1804) was a founding father, soldier, economist, political philosopher, one of America’s first constitutional lawyers and the first United States Secretary of the Treasury.
Eveline Hasler
Evelyn Hasler (born 22 March 1933) is a Swiss writer. Born in Glarus, she studied Psychology and History at the University of Fribourg and worked as a teacher in St. Gallen. She has written both novels (for adults) and children’s books. Her literary estate is archived in the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern. Eveline Hasler lives in Ticino.
James H. Hutson
James H. Hutson received his Ph.D. in History from Yale University in 1964. He has been a member of the History Departments at Yale and William and Mary and, since 1982, has been Chief of the Library’s Manuscript Division.
John Jay
John Jay (12th December 1745 – 17th May 1829) was an American politician, statesman, revolutionary, diplomat, a founding father of the United States, and the first Chief Justice of the United States (1789–95).
Emilie Kempin-Spyri
Emilie Kempin-Spyri (born March 18, 1853 in Altstetten; died April 12, 1901 in Basel; née Spyri, married name Kempin) was the first woman in Switzerland to graduate with a law degree and to be accepted as an academic lecturer. However, as a woman she was not permitted to practice as an attorney; therefore she emigrated to New York, where she taught at a law school she established for women. Emilie Kempin-Spyri was the niece of the author Johanna Spyri.
Regina Kiener
Regina Kiener is a full Professor of Public Law at the University of Zurich. From 1982 to 1989 she studied law at the University of Bern and was admitted to the Bar of the canton of Bern in 1989. She then worked as an attorney, as a scientific assistant at the state chancellery of the Canton of Bern and at the Institute of Public Law at the University of Bern (Prof. Dr. Ulrich Zimmerli). She obtained her doctoral degree in 1994 and won the Walter Hug award for outstanding thesis with her dissertation.
Alfred Kölz
Alfred Kölz went to school at the high school in the city of Solothurn. After his matura, he began to study chemical engineering at the Swiss Institute of Technology. After two semesters, he changed to law at the Universities of Zurich and Berne. In 1973 he received his doctoral degree with a thesis “Prozessmaximen im Schweizerischen Verwaltungsrecht”.
Heinrich Koller
Heinrich Koller studied economics and social sciences at the Universities of St. Gallen, Paris and Winnipeg (1961-1966) and law at the University of Basel (1966-1970). For 3 years, he was a scientific assistant at the University of Basel, wrote his doctoral dissertation, and did the court and notary public practica in the Canton of Solothurn.
Raphael Lanz
Raphael Lanz is the Mayor of the City of Thun in Switzerland. He studied law at the University of Bern and was admitted to the bar of the Canton of Bern in 1995. From 1998 to 1999 with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation he studied at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law. In 1999 he obtained an LL.M with the thesis “Efficient Breach of Contract and Switzerland’s Contract Law”. Lanz obtained his doctoral degree in 2000 with his dissertation “Die wirtschaftliche Betrachtungsweise im schweizerischen Zivilrecht”.
James Madison
James Madison, Jr.(16th March 1751 – 28th June 1836) was an American statesman and political theorist. He is hailed as the “Father of the Constitution” for being instrumental in the drafting of the United States Constitution and as the key champion and author of the United States Bill of Rights. He was the fourth President of the United States (1809–1817). He served as a politician much of his adult life. Like other Virginia statesmen in the slave society, he was a slaveholder and part of the elite; he inherited his plantation known as Montpelier, and owned hundreds of slaves during his lifetime to cultivate tobacco and other crops.
Thomas Maissen
Thomas Maissen studied history, Latin and philosophy in Basel, Rome, and Geneva. He completed his dissertation in 1993 under the guidance of the Swiss historian Hans Rudolf Guggisberg. Afterwards, he worked as an assistant professor at the Chair for Early Modern History at the University of Potsdam.
René Matteotti
René Matteotti has been a Professor of Swiss, European and International Tax Law at the University in Bern since 2007 and in Zurich since 2010. He obtained an M.A at the University of Basel in 1993 and graduated from law school at the University of Bern in 1997.
Heinz K. Meier
Heinz K. Meier is a native of Zurich, Switzerland, where he was born in 1929. He was a member of the so called “free church”. Heinz K. Meier was educated at the Evangelisches Lehrseminar and the University of Zurich and at the Alliance Francaise of Paris.
Louis Menand
Louis Menand (born January 21, 1952) is an American writer and academic, best known for his book The Metaphysical Club (2001), an intellectual and cultural history of late 19th and early 20th century America.
Peter L. Murray
Peter Murray was born in 1943 and is an authority in the fields of evidence, comparative law, trial advocacy, comparative civil procedure, and admiralty law. He started his education at Harvard College, where he studied from 1961 to 1964 and obtained an A.B degree in German.
Peter Nobel, Editor and Author
Peter Nobel studied political science at the University of St. Gallen; he graduated in 1973 with a doctoral thesis entitled “The Harmonization of Corporation Law in the European Common Market” (Dr. rer. publ.). For the following 3 years, he was engaged as a research assistant to Prof. Dr. Arthur Meier-Hayoz at the University of Zurich involved in commercial and company law and for 1 1/2 years, he was a research scholar at the University of Göttingen with Prof. Franz Wieacker focusing on legal history in the field of corporations.
Xavier Oberson
Xavier Oberson has been a Professor of Swiss and International Tax Law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Geneva since 1995. He obtained his doctoral degree from the University of Geneva in 1991 and an LL.M at Harvard Law School in 1992. Oberson is the founding and senior partner of the law firm Oberson Avocats in Geneva. The firm is mostly active in the field of taxation, domestic and international.
Raymond R. Probst
Raymond Probst is former Ambassador of Switzerland to the United States and Secretary of State in the Swiss Ministry for Foreign Affairs.
William Rappard
William Emmanuel Rappard was born in New York City on 22nd April 1883 to Swiss parents. His father was working in the United States as a representative of various Swiss industries. Rappard did his graduate studies in economics at Harvard University from 1906 to 1908. During the academic year 1908-1909 he carried out additional studies at the University of Vienna in Austria-Hungary, attending the seminars of Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk and Eugen Philippovich von Philippsberg, two of the leading figures of the Austrian school of economics before the First World War. From 1911 to 1913, he was an adjunct Professor of Political Economy at Harvard.
Johann Jakob Rüttimann
Johann Jakob Rüttimann (17.3.1813 – 10.1.1876) was a law professor at the University of Zurich and later at the Swiss Institute of Technology, a senator for the Canton of Zurich, a member and president of the Federal Tribunal and a co-founder of Credit Suisse and a vice president of its board for many years.
Peter Saladin
Peter Saladin was born on the 4th February 1935. He studied at the University of Basel, obtained his doctor degree in 1959 and passed his bar exam in 1961. From 1962 to 1963 he carried out graduate work at the Freie Universität Berlin and at the University of Michigan, Law School.
Dietrich Schindler Junior
Dietrich Schindler-Kuhn (1924 – 2018) studied law in Zurich, Geneva, Paris and Harvard, and earned his post-doctoral habilitation at the University of Zurich in 1957. In parallel with and after lecturing at the University of Zurich, the University of Bonn, the University of Michigan and the Hague Academy of International Law, he was full professor for International, European, Constitutional and Administrative Law at the University of Zurich from 1968 to 1989.
Johann August Sutter
Johann August Sutter (February 15, 1803 – June 18, 1880) was a Swiss pioneer of California known for his association with the California Gold Rush by the discovery of gold by James W. Marshall and the mill making team at Sutter’s Mill, and for establishing Sutter’s Fort in the area that would eventually become Sacramento, the state’s capital. Although famous throughout California for his association with the Gold Rush, Sutter saw his business ventures fail while those of his elder son, John Augustus Sutter, Jr., were more successful.
Detlev Vagts
Detlev F. Vagts was born in Washington D.C. on the 13 February 1929 to an American mother and a father who had fled Germany during the rise of the Nazi party. He received his legal education at Harvard Law School, graduating with an LL.B. in 1951.
Arthur T. van Mehren
Arthur T. van Mehren was a world-renowned scholar in international and comparative law whose work influenced generations of lawyers across the globe. Van Mehren and his twin brother won scholarships to Harvard and Yale respectively, and Arthur van Mehren graduated phi beta kappa in 1934.
Nedim Peter Vogt
Nedim Peter Vogt was born in 1952. He studied law at the University of Zurich and obtained his doctorate in 1982. In 1983 he studied at Harvard Law School, where he obtained an LL.M degree. Vogt worked as a lawyer in New York for two years and returned to Switzerland in 1985. Following his return in 1985, he assumed a lectureship in law at the University of Zurich and from 1989 up to 2011 and was partner of the law firm Bär & Karrer.
Paul Widmer
Paul Widmer was born in 1949. He studied history and philosophy at the University of Zurich and Köln. In 1977 he entered the diplomatic service of the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs and carried out internships in Bern and New York: first with the general consular and then with the permanent observer mission at the United Nations.
Wolfgang Wiegand
Wolfgang Wiegand studied law at the universities of Berlin and Munich (1961-1966). He was a university assistant in Munich (1966-1976). He took his bar examination in 1970 and obtained his doctoral degree from the University of Munich in 1972, where he also habilitated in Legal History, Civil Law and Civil Procedure in 1976.
Stefan Zweig
Stefan Zweig (November 28, 1881 – February 22, 1942) was an Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer. At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most famous writers in the world.