Ulrich Stutz

Ulrich Stutz (May 5, 1868, Zürich, Switzerland—July 6, 1938, Berlin, Germany,) was a Swiss-German jurist and historian and pioneering scholar in the academic study of canon law.

[2] His academic distinction rose rapidly after this, with successive appointments to full professorial chairs in canon law and German legal history at Freiburg (1896), Bonn (1904), and finally Berlin (1917), where he remained for the rest of his career.

Stutz's innovation in studying and teaching canon law, as his student Stephan Kuttner observed, was to separate it from legal dogmatics and presentist viewpoints and treat it as a subject of critical historical investigation in its own right.

[10] By contrast, Stutz suggested, Roman law and custom treated religious buildings and institutions as public goods, which led to the emergence of the bishop as the ultimate overseer of ecclesiastical affairs.

At the time, this was seen as a highly innovative and exciting theory that found particular resonance among nationalistically-inclined scholars and students in Germany who appreciated the notion that ancient Germanic cultural practices held the key to understanding the development of church law and institutions in the medieval West.