Stephan Kuttner

Stephan George Kuttner (March 24, 1907 in Bonn – August 12, 1996 in Berkeley), an expert in Canon Law, was recognized as a leader in the discovery, interpretation and analysis of important texts and manuscripts that are key to understanding the evolution of legal systems from Roman law to modern constitutional law.

Born in Bonn, Germany, into a family of Jewish ancestry, Kuttner was raised as a Lutheran and converted to Roman Catholicism in 1932. He received his law degree from Berlin University in 1931, where he was a classmate and friend of the legal historian Hsu Dau-lin. Two years later he fled Nazi Germany for Italy, where he worked as a research fellow at the Vatican Library and taught at the Lateran University in Rome. In 1940, he emigrated to the United States with his young family. He was a professor at Washington, D.C.'s Catholic University of America from 1940 to 1964, where a chair in canon law is named in his honor. At Yale University he was the first occupant of the T. Lawrason Riggs Chair of Catholic Studies, which he held for five years. Thereafter he became the first Director of the Robbins Collection in Roman and Canon Law in the University of California, Berkeley School of Law (1970–1988), and continued as Emeritus Professor of Law until his death.

Kuttner had a large family and at the time of his death was survived by his wife, Eva (née Illch), eight of nine children, twenty grandchildren, 14 great-grandchildren and a sister. Eva Kuttner died on November 14, 2007.

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