Franz von Benda-Beckmann

Franz von Benda-Beckmann (Greifswald, 29 November 1941 – Amsterdam, 7 January 2013) was a legal anthropologist who published many scholarly books and articles on legal anthropological theory and on property rights, social (in)security, and legal pluralism in developing countries. He held academic positions at the University of Zurich, Leiden University, Wageningen University & Research, and the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg.

Biography Von Benda-Beckmann studied law at Kiel University, LMU Munich, and the University of Lausanne. After an assistantship at the Ethnological Seminar of the University of Zurich and habilitation there in general ethnology in 1979, he taught as a Privatdozent in Zurich and as a privaatdocent in Leiden. and he jointly became research directors of the Legal Pluralism Project Group (German: Projektgruppe Rechtspluralismus) at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale) in 2000, where he facilitated the establishment of the third Department of Law and Ethnology (Recht und Ethnologie). Juridical PhD dissertation, Kiel 1970. Translated as Habilitation thesis, Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal, Land- en Volkenkunde, Leiden, 455 pages. 495 pages.

Secondary literature