Slobodan Jovanović (; 3 December 1869 – 12 December 1958) was a Serbian and Yugoslav writer, historian, lawyer, philosopher, literary critic, diplomat, politician and one of the most prominent intellectuals of his time. He was the professor at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Law (1897—1940), Rector of the University of Belgrade (1913–14 and 1920–21), and the President of the Serbian Royal Academy (1928–1931). He took part at the Paris Peace Conference (1919) as an expert for the Yugoslav Government.
Jovanović was the Deputy Prime Minister (March 1941 - June 1942) and the Prime Minister of the Royal Yugoslav government-in-exile in London between January 1942 and June 1943. After World War II, the new Communist authorities of Yugoslavia sentenced him in absentia to 20 years' imprisonment. Jovanović remained at liberty for the rest of his life in London.
Biography
Slobodan Jovanović was born in Újvidék, Austria-Hungary (present-day Novi Sad, Serbia) on 3 December 1869 to politician Vladimir Jovanović and his wife Jelena. He was reportedly the first Serbian male to be named "Slobodan" (sloboda means "freedom" in Serbian), while his sister was named Pravda ("Justice"). He received an excellent education in Belgrade, Munich, Zurich, and Geneva, where he graduated with a law degree. From 1890 to 1892, he took post-graduate studies in constitutional law and political science in Paris before entering the Serbian foreign service. In 1893 he was appointed political attaché with the Serbian mission to Constantinople, where he remained for a couple years. It was at this time that he began to write and have his articles on literary criticism published in various publications throughout the land.
He eventually left the diplomatic service in favour of academia and literary pursuits and became a contributing author and literary critic for several notable newspapers of the time. In 1897 he was appointed professor at the University of Belgrade's Faculty of Law. During the Balkan Wars and the First World War he was the Head of Serbian War Office Press Bureau. In this period Jovanović became acquainted with Dragutin Dimitrijević Apis and wrote positively of him. Shortly after the foundation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, in 1920, Stojan Protić, acting as Prime Minister of the Temporary National Representation, appointed Jovanović as the President of a multi-ethnic constitutional drafting committee alongside Kosta Kumanudi, Bogumil Vošnjak, Ladislav Polić, and Lazar Marković which later that year presented the first draft of what would later become the Vidovdan Constitution.
For more than four decades, Jovanović taught at the law faculty gaining a reputation as an authority on constitutional law and Serbian language and literature. He was Rector of the University of Belgrade on two separate occasions and Dean of Faculty of Law. Jovanović joined the Serbian Royal Academy in 1908, and was its President from 1928 to 1931. He was also a correspondent member of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb from 1927.
Slobodan Jovanović was a critic of Hans Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law. His primary remarks are on the relation of Kelsen's theory to other German theorists at the time. He considered Kelsen an innovative "young" theorist, but thought that his framework was not as dissimilar to more classical theories that Kelsen, in Jovanović's opinion, tried to attack. Namely, Jovanović posited that the special position of the Basic norm for Kelsen could be reduced to the framework of more classical German theories, in which the state is a legal person from which the legal system originates, and vice versa. Jovanović considered this to be a flaw of Kelsen's Legal positivism that makes it a theory that does not truly address the origins of the law, as it fails to truly separate in analysis the legal system from the state as an actor. In this way, Jovanović rejects an analysis that would fully divorce the man as a legal creature, from man as a political one.
Jovanović had some influence on political life in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia due to his well established authority in the field of law and history, but he entered directly political life only in 1939 when the Serbian Cultural Club was established, and he was appointed as Club's president.