As he was growing up, he exhibited especial intellectual abilities, but also a great interest for sports and art.
He developed a background in finance while also helping German Jews transfer their assets out of the country in order to escape Nazi persecution.
His arrival in the field during the early 1950s helped to give it both greater legitimacy and popularity in legal academia.
In 1993 Schlesinger's successor at Hastings Ugo Mattei together with Italian comparativist Mauro Bussani launched the "Common Core of European Private Law Project" deploying the Cornell factual approach to study European contract, property and tort law.
The results of the common core project that "on the shoulders of Schlesinger" involves some two hundred scholars from all over the world are published in an ongoing series at Cambridge University Press.