Werner Flume

[4][2] In 1930 Flume passed the First State Examination in Law before the Higher Regional Court of Cologne and in July 1931 he wrote his doctoral thesis titled "Studien zur Akzessorietät der römischen Bürgschaftsstipulationen".

[6] At Berlin university, Flume wrote the core of his thesis "Eigenschaftsirrtum und Kauf",[7] which – however – was not to be published until 1948 and was originally intended as the basis for his habilitation.

[3] But after the establishment of Nazi Germany, Fritz Schulz was removed from Berlin University due to his Jewish heritage under the antisemitic 1933 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service and Flume thus lost his academic teacher.

[13] In 1946, he was habilitated in Bonn – even though Wolfgang Kunkel was a professor in Heidelberg since 1943[13] – with the work "Die Vererblichkeit der suspensiv bedingten Obligationen nach klassischem römischem Recht",[13][14] which had already been published ten years earlier in Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis, a Dutch law journal.

[16] Flume's historical perspective on private law made him cite Friedrich Carl von Savigny frequently in this work.

"[17] In 1972 Flume developed the so-called "Gruppenlehre" (group doctrine), which argues for the (partial) legal capacity of the German civil law partnership (Gesellschaft bürgerlichen Rechts [de]).

[18][19] In addition, Flume established within his 1948 work "Eigenschaftsirrtum und Kauf" the subjective concept of defect (subjektiver Fehlerbegriff) for the purposes of sales law.

[20] Flume was a staunch opponent of apparent authority (Anscheinsvollmacht [de]) and throughout his life, he paid particular attention to the law of unjust enrichment.

[8] For his contributions to the German private law, Thomas Lobinger [de] – a Heidelberg University professor – called Flume a "lawyer of the century" ("Jahrhunderjurist").