Nussbaum, Arthur (1877–1964)

Arthur Nussbaum was a German jurist, born in Berlin, best known for his writings on private international law, the law of money, and the history of public international law. He left Nazi Germany and came to Columbia Law School in 1934 and remained active as a scholar there until shortly before his death.

Nussbaum came to prominence in 1914 when he published Die Rechtstatsachenvorschung (Fact Research in Law), an innovative forty-eight-page tract that anticipated some elements of American legal realism. His book that same year on the German law of mortgages applied this manifesto, connecting legal doctrine with socioeconomic practice, and used statistical data in a way that was then uncommon in legal texts.

He moved from private legal practice in 1914 and became Privatdozent, and from 1918 to 1933 was professor of law at the University of Berlin. He orchestrated four volumes in German of an ambitious multiauthor International Yearbook of Civil and Commercial Arbitration (1926–1934), the first volume of which appeared in English translation in 1928 through the American Arbitration Association. Deprived of his chair under anti-Jewish measures, he escaped to Holland. From there he traveled to New York, where Karl Llewellyn (1893–1962) assisted Nussbaum to obtain his post as Research Professor of Law at Columbia University (Ansaldi 1992: 719).

Nussbaum's Principles of Private International Law (1943), which built on his fine studies of German, Austrian, Swiss, and American private international law, was characteristically clear, concise, and direct. Similar qualities are evident in his articles that bluntly critiqued the Soviet government's position in the Lena Goldfields arbitration, the reticence of New York courts to make decisive findings about foreign law, and the lack of effective mechanisms in many countries for enforcement of foreign arbitral awards (prior to the New York Convention, 1958).

His Money in the Law (1939, 2d ed. 1950) was supplemented by writings on related issues of contract law (including indexing of payments), national monetary regulation, and public international law concerning currency and gold. This work led to a lighter, popular book,A History of the Dollar (1957), which, although not entirely reliable on history and economics, remains a lively and readable introduction to historico-legal issues and numismatistic interests.

Nussbaum's greatest posthumous intellectual impact has probably been through his Concise History of the Law of Nations (1947, 2d ed. 1954). The developmentalist organizational frame of the book, the relative neglect of imperialism and traditions outside the Euro-American world, and some of his specific historical assessments, are all questioned as scholarship has developed. Nevertheless, this learned book continues to be widely used because of the author's clarity, erudition, and judiciously judgmental style. It is a measure of his achievement that this book has been supplemented but not superseded.