Immigrants of the Day: Edgar and Brigitte Bodenehimer (Germany)

Our Immigrants of the Day are Law Professors Edgar and Brigitte Bodenehimer, both of Germany.

Born in Berlin, Edgar (1908-91) was educated in universities of Geneva, Munich, Heidelberg, and Berlin. After receiving his from the University of Heidelberg, he immigrated to the United States to escape the Nazis. He then earned a LL.B. from the University of Washington. Edgar started his legal career as an Attorney for the U.S. Department of Labor and then became the principal attorney at the Office of Alien Property Custodian in Washington D.C.  In 1945, Edgar served in the Office of Chief of Counsel for the prosecution of Axis Criminality at the Nuremberg Trials. He joined the law faculty of the University of Utah in 1946, and became a founding faculty member at UC Davis School of Law in 1966. Although he retired in 1975, Edgar continued writing and lecturing at UC Davis until his death in 1991.  Edgar Bodenhimer’s scholarship includes Jurisprudence (1940), Jurisprudence: The Philosophy and Method of the Law (1962), Jurisprudence: The Philosophy and Method of the Law (revised edition, 1974), Treatise on Justice (1967), Power, Law, And Society; A Study of the Will to Power and the Will to Law (1972), and Philosophy of Responsibility (1980).

Also born in Berlin, Professor Brigitte M. Bodenheimer (1921-81) immigrated to the United States in 1934 and earned a second law degree from the University of Washington. She was a member of the University of Utah law faculty before coming to UC Davis in 1966; along with her husband Edgar, she was one of the founding faculty members of the law school. Professor Bodenheimer developed distinct features of King Hall that endure to this day. First, along with Edgar, she established the tradition of international and comparative law that continues as one of UC Davis’s greatest strengths.  Second, she created a strong international presence in family law, a tradition that has been carried forward to this day. Professor Bodenheimer gained international distinction for her family law and child custody scholarship. Not content to limit her work to the academy, Professor Bodenheimer began yet another UC Davisl tradition and became a leading law reformer. To this day, her impact on countless children and their families lives on in the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction Act, for which she was the Reporter, and the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, which she helped draft.

Today, UC Davis School of Law is happy to host the 2008-09 Brigitte M. Bodenheimer Lecture on Family Law will feature Reva Siegel, Deputy Dean and the Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law and Professor of American Studies at Yale University. She will deliver a lecture entitled “Roe’s Roots: The Women’s Rights Claims that Engendered Roe.”

KJ