Franz von Liszt

Franz von Liszt (1851-1919) was a German jurist and criminologist who taught criminal law and international law at the University of Berlin from 1898 to 1917. His 1882 inaugural lecture at Marburg, later known as the Marburg Program, argued that punishment should serve preventive purposes such as rehabilitation, deterrence and incapacitation rather than pure retribution, and that offenders should be treated differently depending on whether they were occasional, correctable or incorrigible. In 1889 he co-founded the International Union of Criminal Law (Internationale Kriminalistische Vereinigung) together with the Belgian jurist Adolphe Prins and the Dutch jurist Gerard van Hamel, and his criminal law textbook went through twenty six editions by 1932, shaping penal reform including the spread of suspended sentences and probation.