REDLICH, JOSEPH

REDLICH, JOSEPH (1869–1936), Austrian constitutional lawyer and politician. Born in Goeding, Moravia, Redlich was acknowledged as an outstanding authority on Austrian and British parliamentary procedure. He was made assistant professor at the University of Vienna in 1905 and full professor in 1908. Redlich was active in politics and, from 1906 to 1918, was a Liberal member of the Moravian Landtag (provincial legislature) and the Austrian Reichstrat. His support for the Western Allies before World War i barred him from the Austrian government until 1918 when shortly before the fall of the empire he was made minister of finance in the last Hapsburg government. Redlich was an authority on American legal education on which he had written a study in 1905. He was invited to lecture in the United States at the Institute of Politics at Williamstown, Massachusetts, and at Harvard. In 1929 he was appointed professor of comparative law at the latter university but in 1931 was recalled to Austria to become minister of finance for a second time during the Austrian financial crisis. Redlich retained this post until the advent of the Dolfuss regime in 1934. He was baptized in 1903.

Redlich's many works include The Procedure of the House of Commons (3 vols., 1908); The Common Law and the Case Method in American University Law Schools (1914); and Das Wesen der oesterreichischen Kommunalverfassung (1910) as well as a number of important books on Austrian political history, such as Das oesterreichische Staats- und Reichsproblem (1920) and Oesterreichische Regierung und Verwaltung im Weltkriege (1925). He also wrote a history of English local government, Englische Lokalverwaltung (1901; trans. by F.W. Hirst, Local Government in England, 1903; vol. 1, republished 1958) in which he traced the growth of democratic institutions in English local government.

bibliography:

J. Redlich and F.W. Hirst, History of Local Government in England (1958²), introd. by B. Keith-Lucas, 7–15.

[Josef J. Lador-Lederer]