Ernst Swoboda and the Czechoslovak Draft Civil Code of the Interwar Period

Ernst Swoboda (1879–1950) is among the leading civil law scholars and legal philosophers of the interwar period in Central Europe. This paper examines a chapter of his work that is well-known in the German-speaking world, namely the period of the 1930s, when, as a professor at the German University in Prague, he participated in drafting the Czechoslovak Civil Code. Based on the study of archival sources and contemporary publications, it aims to reconstruct and analyse Swoboda’s contribution to this project. His criticism of some original proposals significantly influenced the final wording of individual provisions (certain introductory provisions of Civil Code; the concept of personhood, possession, and ownership; strict liability). He introduced the natural law philosophy of Immanuel Kant and the contemporary German philosophy of Oswald Spengler into local legal discourse, bringing into it two influences that remained marginal and are still insufficiently explored within Czechoslovak interwar legal science. Thus, the paper is not merely a presentation of an episode in the legal science of a single state, but in a certain sense opens a broader topic of the intermingling of legal science in Central Europe during the period between the World Wars.