Rheinstein, Max (1899–1977)

Max Rheinstein was one of the most prominent of the European refugee scholars who pioneered in establishing the comparative study of law in American law schools. Born in Bavaria a year before the German Civil Code went into effect, Rheinstein attended the University of Munich at a time of intellectual ferment in legal theory and private law. Among his teachers were two renowned scholars who had a lasting influence on his intellectual development: Max Weber (1864–1920) and Ernst Rabel (1874–1955). Rheinstein became Rabel's assistant in 1922, and shortly thereafter began teaching at the University of Berlin. As a Christian of Jewish descent, however, he was obliged to flee when the National Socialist regime came to power in 1933. He emigrated to the United States where he secured a position on the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School.

For forty-two years, Rheinstein taught and wrote on family law, succession, conflict of laws, legal theory, and comparative law, amassing a bibliography of over four hundred publications. The Foreign Law Program he founded at Chicago enabled numerous lawyers from other countries to become acquainted with the United States legal system and trained several Americans in the European civil law tradition.

In the aftermath of World War II, Rheinstein assisted the American military government with the reopening of the German courts and the reconstitution of the law faculties of the universities in the American zone of occupation. He also served on the Allied Control Council's Committee on the Revision of German Law. In those roles, he spoke out with humanity and foresight against equating Germans with Nazis, against the abuses of military government, and against disguising political judgments as legal judgments in connection with the prosecution of war criminals. He opposed proposals for partitioning Germany into two halves, arguing that the long-term interests of democracy would be better served if Germany were reestablished as a unified country.

Rheinstein's best-known scholarly work was in the field of family law. His cross-national comparisons of the “law on the books” with the “law in action” suggested that there was no simple correlation between strict or easy divorce and the incidence of marriage breakdown in a given country. This research culminated in a book published in 1972, at the height of the revolution in the grounds for divorce—Marriage Stability, Divorce, and the Law.

Yet, when no-fault divorce began to spread, Rheinstein was not among its proponents. He wrote that he considered the system of relatively strict law on the books and relatively lenient divorce in practice as an enlightened “democratic compromise” that acknowledged the ideals of a large part of the population while recognizing the inability of many people to live up to those ideals. He was one of the first persons to make the connection between marriage breakdown and the poverty of women and children and to raise concerns about the defects of support and marital property law in the no-fault system.

Rheinstein helped to make the University of Chicago Law School of the 1950s and 1960s a center for interdisciplinary studies. One of his chief contributions was to translate and interpret Max Weber's writings on law for the English-speaking world. His 1954 introductory essay to Max Weber on Law in Economy and Society remains the authoritative concise explanation of Weber's legal sociology.

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