Josip Wilfan

Josip Vilfan or Wilfan (30 August 1878 - 8 March 1955) was a Slovene lawyer, politician, and human rights activist from Trieste. In the early 1920s, he was one of the political leaders of the Slovene and Croatian minority in the Italian-administered Julian March. Together with Engelbert Besednjak, Lavo Čermelj and Ivan Marija Čok, he was the most influential representative of the Slovene émigrés from the Slovenian Littoral during the 1930s. Next to Leonid Pitamic and Boris Furlan, Vilfan is considered as one of the most important Slovene legal theorists of the first half of the 20th century.

He was born as Josip Wilfan in a Slovene-speaking upper middle class in Trieste, which was then the largest port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Italy). His father was a renowned civil engineer. Josip attended a private Slovene language elementary school in Trieste. When he was a teenager, his father moved to the Dalmatian coastal town of Dubrovnik, where Josip finished a Croatian language high school. He studied law at the University of Vienna, graduating in 1901. He moved back to Trieste, initially working as an assistant in the law firm of the Istrian Croatian national liberal politician Matko Laginja, before opening his own law firm.

...
Wikipedia