BLUNTSCHLI, JOHANN KASPAR Swiss jurist and politician, was born at Zurich, the son of a soap manu facturer. Educated at the Politische Institut of his native town and at Berlin and Bonn, he threw himself into Swiss politics, plead ing in his Das V olk und der Souveran (183o) for constitutionalism and protesting against radical policy. Elected in 1837 a member of the great council, of which he became president, his uncom promising conservatism made his position untenable. After the overthrow of the Sonderbund in 1847 he settled at Munich, where he became professor of constitutional law in 1848.
There he devoted himself to the work of his chair, and published Allgemeines Staatsrecht (1851-52); Lehre vom modernen Staat (1875-76); and with Karl Brater (1819-69), Deutsches Staats worterbuch (ir vols., 1857-7o; abridged by Edgar Loening into 3 vols., 1869-75). Meanwhile he had laboured at his code for the canton of Zurich, Privatrechtliches Gesetzbuch fiir den Kanton Zurich (4 vols., 1854-56). The section, devoted to contracts in this work, served as a model for codes in Switzerland and other countries. In 1861 Bluntschli went to Heidelberg as professor of constitutional law, where he again entered the political arena, en deavouring in his Geschichte des allgemeinen Staatsrechts und der Politik (1864) "to stimulate," as he said, "the political conscious pess of the German people, to cleanse it of prejudices and to fur ther it intellectually." In his new home, Baden, he strove, during the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, to keep the country neutral. From this time Bluntschli became active in the field of interna tional law and wrote Das moderne Kriegsrecht (1866) ; Das moderne Volkerrecht (1868) and Das Beuterecht im Krieg (1878). Bluntschli was one of the founders, at Ghent in 1873, of the Institute of International Law, and was the representative of the German emperor at the conference on the international laws of war at Brussels. He died suddenly at Karlsruhe on Oct. 21, 1881. His library was acquired by Johns Hopkins university at Balti more, U.S.A.