The research project in question undertakes the attempt of tracing the “transfer” of legal thought, Austrian norms and maybe also “Austrian legal culture” to the United States. It does so by telling the story of three “Austrian” legal scholars, who all left their alma mater between 1933 and 1945 and continued their career in the United States – working each in one of the main fields of law (Private law, Public law, Legal Philosophy).

In International Law the focus of my research project will be on Josef Laurenz Kunz (1890–1970) who taught international law at at the University of Toledo (Ohio) from 1934 onward.

For the criminal-law component, the focus will shift to the presumably first female professor of criminal law in the United States, the Austrian-Polish jurist of Jewish decent Henryka Silberpfennig, later Helen Silving (1906-1993). After many years of struggling for a permanent position Silving finally was awarded a chair of Criminal Law at the University of Puerto Rico in 1956, where she soon was to become a counsel to the Legislative Penal Reform Commission of Puerto Rico and was commissioned to draft a reformed Penal Code.

As far as Civil Law is concerned, I am planning to concentrate my research activities on the work of the expert in civil law Albert Armin Ehrenzweig (1906-1974), who was among the thousands of researchers expelled from Austria by the Nazis. In 1948 he was awarded a chair of Private Law in 1948 at UC Berkeley. In tandem with German scholar Stefan Riesenfeld (1908–1999) he inaugurated comparative legal studies there and became one of the best known experts in Private Law and the conflict of laws in the United States.

The research project in question deals with on of the key elements of the Austrian-American relations: The second world war and its consequences in the field of legal scholarship. While the “paths to emigration” of most “Austrian” legal scholars emigrating to the Americas have already been made the subject of research the lives, networks and scientific work done by them in their new home has received comparatively little attention.

My research project will therefore sort of speak start at a point where the already existing research stopped.