Franz Eduard Ritter von Liszt (2 March 1851 – 21 June 1919) was a German jurist, criminologist and international law reformer.

Karolina, who was Eduard von Liszt's first wife, was born in Çilli, Turkey, and died of cholera in Vienna in 1854.

The composer needed the title to marry the Princess of Sayn-Wittgenstein without her losing her privileges, so he solicited the nobilitation which was conceded by the emperor in recognition of his services to Austria.

After the marriage fell through, the composer transferred the title to his uncle Eduard, the father of the subject of this article, in 1867 when he received the Minor Orders of the Catholic Church.

In 1882, while in Marburg, he held his first seminar on criminology and continued to work on building the scientific journal covering the entire field of criminal justice.

He also founded the so-called "Marburg School" of criminal law, asserting that crime must be essentially looked upon as a social phenomenon.

He was active in Berlin beginning in about 1900 in the Progressive People's Party and was a member of the City Council of Charlottenburg until 1908, when he was elected to the Prussian House of Representatives.

As a liberal outsider with courage, he was sitting on the cross benches, so that in neither the established society of Prussia nor in the empire was there much support for his positions.

The concept of punishment and criminal law based on the methods and ideas of positivism was directed against metaphysical justifications of retribution.

Liszt wanted to overcome the prevailing theories of punishment by Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

With this in mind, he advocated differentiation of special prevention based on types of offender: In 1889, he co-founded the International Criminal Law Association (German: Internationale Kriminalistische Vereinigung).

They put long monologues into the mouths of spectators who had said nothing; they "heard" the row as being about a dozen different imagined subjects, from girlfriends to debts to exams; they saw blood everywhere, when there was none.

The recidivist, for instance, would upon his third conviction of an offense motivated by "the strongest and most basic human drives" (including theft, robbery, arson, and rape, but also damaging property) be sentenced to an indeterminate prison term, to be served in a state of "penal servitude," with the use of corporal punishment to enforce prison discipline.

The cumbersome, and legalistic, construct of criminal law doctrine was to be replaced by a more flexible, modern, scientific ("progressive") system for the proper diagnosis, and classification, of offenders, which was crucial for the prescription of the correction quality and quantity of peno-correctional treatment.

They comprise a firm basis for all the unwritten legal rules of international law, and are its oldest, most important and holiest content.

"[5] Liszt advocated the creation of a mandatory arbitration court, as he saw it as the first step towards effective integration of countries into a grand organized international federation.