Julius Abegg

Julius Abegg, in full Julius Friedrich Heinrich Abegg, was a German criminal law scholar, born in Erlangen on 23 March 1796 and died in Breslau on 29 May 1868. The son of a Reformed preacher who moved the family to Königsberg, he studied law at Erlangen, Heidelberg and Landshut, practised at the regional court of Erlangen and heard Hegel and Savigny in Berlin. He became extraordinary professor at Königsberg in 1821, full professor there in 1824 and moved to Breslau in 1826, where he stayed for the rest of his career. He argued for a theory of equitableness in punishment, under which the penalty answers the wrong done, weighs the motives of the offender and serves retribution, deterrence and the protection of society, and he defended the death penalty on those grounds. He edited the Archiv des Criminalrechts and published textbooks, a history of Prussian penal legislation and many critiques of draft criminal codes.