Dietrich Reinkingk (in Latin sources Theodor Reinking (10 March 1590 – 15 December 1664) was a German constitutional lawyer and politician, much of whose career was adversely impacted by the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648).
[1][2] He was also an important early contributor to the Reichspublizistik movement, which sought to document and thereby promote and legitimise the constitutional arrangements and processes that operated in the Holy Roman Empire.
[3] Dietrich Reinkingk was born in Windau, a port city and commercial centre now in Latvia, but in 1590 a German town in the Duchy of Courland.
[2] As chancellor in the administration of Bremen, Reinkingk took part in peace negotiations at Münster and Osnabrück which eventually led to the end of the war in 1648.
In 1649[2] or 1650,[1] the year of his sixtieth birthday, Dietrich Reinkingk was appointed to a position he had coveted, as President of the Appeal Court at Pinneberg.
[1] Unlike most of the Danish King's lands Holstein, which was included in Reinkingk's own extensive administrative bailiwick, was part of the Holy Roman Empire (as its most northerly region).
Reinkingk imputed to the old Roman sources of the law a level of authority equal to that of Holy Scripture, eternal theological fundamentals and Lutheran dogma.
His legal teaching was influenced by Lutheran ethics and by biblical theology, but tending towards a unified post-confessional constitutional order.