August von Bulmerincq

August Michael von Bulmerincq ( – 18 August 1890) was a Baltic German scholar of international law, considered one of the most important German-speaking legal scholars of his generation. He was born in Riga, in what was at the time the Governorate of Livonia of the Russian Empire. His family was wealthy and influential. From 1841, he studied law at the University of Tartu, and eventually settled in Tartu and pursued a long academic career. Upon his retirement in 1874, he moved to Wiesbaden in present-day Germany and was given the char of international law at Heidelberg University, which he maintained until his death. He was one of the founding members of the ''Institut de Droit International''.

His academic work focused on the theoretical underpinnings of international law. He insisted on the separation between law and politics, following in the liberal tradition of Friedrich Carl von Savigny. In his legal positivist view, an expanding legal order and a legalisation of international relations was an important part of a broader, teleological civilisational progression which mankind was engaged in, and which would lead away from a more capricious political order to a predictable, law-based order.

Politically he was a conservative, whose views of contemporary political issues were closely linked to his identity as a Lutheran and a Baltic German. Provided by Wikipedia