GRADENWITZ, OTTO. - Jurist, b. at Breslau on 16 May 1860, d. at Heidelberg on 7 July 1935.
He was a professor of Roman law, first as an extraordinary professor at Berlin in 1890, whence he moved to Königsberg (1895), then to Strasbourg (1907) and finally to Heidelberg, where he taught until 1928. He was the one who succeeded in the criticism of the sources, linking back to what Cujas and Faber had done; and, for the moment in which it appeared (1887), in the fullest flowering of pandectism, his work Die Interpolationen in den Pandekten is the work of a precursor (v. INTERPOLAZIONI). Textual criticism found in him an extremely acute investigator of extraordinary versatility, who applied the method of decomposition to the Justinianic and Theodosian legal texts, to the republican laws, to the Rule of St. Benedict and to the writings of Bismarck. To him is due the impulse given to the Vocabularium iurisprudentiae romanae; to his personal labor are due the Heidelberger Index zum Theodosianus (1925; v. CODEX THEODOSIANUS), the index of the Theodosian and post-Theodosian Novels; the Laterculi vocum latinarum (1904), a double index of the entire Latin lexicon in direct and reverse alphabetical order.
He also edited the edition of Bruns's Fontes iuris romani antiqui, enriching it with indexes; and he wrote an Einführung in die Papyruskunde (Leipzig 1900) still usefully consulted.
Bibliography2 works
Rodolfo Danieli
GRADI: a) academic: v. BACCELLIERE, BACCELLIERATO; LAUREA; LICENZA; b) hierarchical: v. POTERE, DIVISIONE del; c) of cognition: v. AFFINITÀ; CONSANGUINEITÀ.