Otto Kirchheimer

Otto Kirchheimer (1905-1965) was a German-American legal scholar and political scientist, born in Heilbronn, Germany, who earned his doctorate in law from the University of Bonn in 1928 and was affiliated with the Frankfurt School's Institute for Social Research, first in Paris from 1934 to 1938 after fleeing Nazi Germany, then in the United States after 1937, where he taught at Columbia University and worked for the Office of Strategic Services from 1943 to 1952. With Georg Rusche he co-authored Punishment and Social Structure, published in 1939 as the Institute's first English-language book, analyzing how penal systems reflect and reinforce the economic and social hierarchies of the societies that produce them, a work that became foundational to Marxist criminology. His later book Political Justice, published in 1961, examined how legal procedure can be turned to explicitly political ends.