![handle is hein.journals/grotia26 and id is 1 raw text is: GROTIANA
BRILL Grotiana 34 (2073) 7-5 brilLcom/grot
In Memoriam
Robert Feenstra (1920-2013)
Professor Robert Feenstra, one of the foremost specialists on the legal writ-
ings of Hugo Grotius and member of the Board of the Grotiana Foundation
since its (re)formation in 1979, passed away on March 2, 2013 at the age of
92. Born in the capital of the former Dutch East Indies, Batavia (now
Jakarta) on October 5, 1920 where his father practiced as a solicitor, he pro-
ceeded in 1938 to study law at the University of Amsterdam where he
became interested in legal history at an early stage. Although he had to
interrupt his studies during the German occupation owing to the suspen-
sion of teaching, he still managed to win a gold medal from his university in
1943 with an essay on a topic that would later become the subject of his
doctoral thesis: the Roman rules of the payment of the price in the contract
of sale.' After obtaining his doctorate at the University of Amsterdam in
1949 (iudicium: cum laude) he was immediately appointed as Professor of
Legal History in Utrecht where he taught from 1949 until 1952 when he
accepted the chair of Roman law and its History at Leyden University where
he taught until his retirement in 1985.
From 1959 onwards he published extensively on Grotius's legal heritage.
His first publication was devoted to the prehistory of Grotius's doctrine of
delictual liability, a topic that remained on his publishing agenda for
decades.2 One of his early publications on Grotius was on a seemingly
unedited preface to the Introduction to the jurisprudence of Holland which
he had discovered in a manuscript in the library of Wolfenbittel.3 A year
1 Reclame en Revindicatie, Onderzoekingen omtrent de rol in de ontwikkelingsgeschiedenis
van het recht van reclame gespeeld door den Romeinsrechtelyken regel ormtrent de eigen-
domsverkryging en prysbetaling by koop (Inst 2,7,47) (Haarlem, 1949).
2 'Thdories sur la responsabilit6 civile en cas d'homicide et en cas de 1sion corporelle
avant Grotius, in: Etudes d'histoire du droitprive offertes a PierrePetot, [Paris] 1959, PP. 157-171;
'Over de oorsprong van twee omstreden paragrafen uit de Inleidinge van Hugo de Groot (III.
33. 2 en III. 34. 2), Actajuridica 1958 [In Memory of Robert Warden Lee; published in 1959],
27-42. [= R. Feenstra, Fata Ivris Romani (Leiden, 1974), PP. 323-3371
3 Ten handschrift van de Inleidinge van Hugo de Groot met de onuitgegeven Prolegomena
juriHollandicopraemittenda', TydschriftvoorRechtsgeschiedenis [TvR], 35(1967), 444-484
@ Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013
DOI 10.1163/18760759-03400005](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/grotia26&div=1&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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