Carl Hilty

Carl Andreas Hilty (28 February 1833 – 12 October 1909) was a Swiss lawyer, professor of constitutional law, politician, philosopher, lay theologian and writer.

His father was the physician Johann Ulrich Hilty, who practised medicine in Chur, the capital of the eastern canton of the Grisons.

[1] Carl Hilty's mother Elisabeth (née Kilias) hailed from Chur and was the daughter of a former regimental doctor of the French Army.

Her mother Marie Simon, who was born in Breslau as the daughter of a judge and one-time chairman of the Prussian examination board of jurists, had written and published a political novel about the German revolutions of 1848–1849.

Like her brother Heinrich Simon, who had been a prominent member of the Frankfurt Parliament, she apparently had to escape anti-democratic and anti-liberal repressions in the reactionary era that followed the subdued revolutions and joined him in his Swiss exile.

[5] Hilty's sister Anna was married to the jurist and brigadier Hand Hold, one of the leading Grisonian liberals during the second half of the 19th century.

From 1886, he edited Politisches Jahrbuch der schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft (The Journal of Swiss Jurisprudence) Hilty's philosophical concern was practical in nature.

[10] The work was translated into English by Prof. Francis Greenwood Peabody, Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard University, and first appeared in the United States in 1903.