Rafał Taubenschlag

In 1927 he became a member of the Polish Academy of Learning and in 1929 he was made dean of the Law School at UJ.

[1] When World War II broke out Rafał managed to escape, thanks to help from his former students, to Romania.

Subsequently he made his way to the United States where with help from the Rockefeller Foundation he obtained positions at the New School of Social Research (between 1940 and 1942) and Columbia (until 1947).

According to some former students, toward the end of his life Taubenschlag became quite eccentric, often talking to himself as if carrying on academic debates with imaginary scholars and opponents.

At the same time, his reputation as a weird old eccentric enabled him to publicly express political opinions which, in communist Poland during the Stalinist 1950s, would have gotten anyone else fired from his academic position or arrested.