Reinhard Frank (16 August 1860 - 21 March 1934) was a German lawyer-academic specialising in criminal law and international public law. He was a prolific author of legal text books and became an influential law reformer. In 1920 Frank was appointed Rector (chief administrative officer) of Munich University.
Life
Provenance and early years
Reinhard Karl Albrecht Otto Friedrich Georg Julius Ludwig Hermann Frank (after 1912 "...von Frank") was born at Reddighausen, (Hatzfeld) in the hill country between Cologne and Kassel. His father, Wilhelm Frank (1829-1889), described in at least one source simply as a hammer owner, was a small-scale industrialist with large ambitions for his son. His mother, born Minna Koch (1838–1863), was the daughter of a district judge (also named Reinhard) and came from a family with a long tradition of mid-level government service. His father was keen that Reinhard Frank should prosper in business, and with this in mind the boy was sent in 1871 to attend the "Realprogymnasium" (an advanced secondary school) in Biedenkopf. He then switched to the "Realgymnasium" in Groß-Umstadt before moving on again to a third school in the area, the prestigious Gymnasium Philippinum at Marburg. The objective was to maximise his chances of gaining a university place. The academic nature of the secondary schools he had attended meant that he had a received good grounding in Latin, and passing the Abitur (school finals) in 1879 cleared the way for the progression to university-level education.
Student years
He now enrolled at the University of Marburg to study Philology and Mathematics. Wilhelm Frank had firm ideas about the future direction of his son's career: Reinhard Frank's degree subject selection involved defying his father's wishes that everything he did should be directed toward taking charge, in due course, of the family business. He switched to Jurisprudence after just one term because, as he later explained, he was disappointed by the "lack of attention afforded the cultural and literary-historical contexts and all the other perspectives" involved in the study trajectory he had formerly selected. At some point around 1880 he took a year out from his university studies to volunteer for a one-year commission with the Marburg-based Hesse Infantry Battalion ("hessische Jägerbataillon") Nbr.11. Slightly unusually, on completion of his volunteer year, he did not sign up as a reserve officer. The record discloses that during his relatively brief time as a Marburg student he was, like many contemporaries, a member of the "Germania Marburg" student fraternity.
Graduation and beyond
During 1881/82 he studied for two terms at Munich where one of his lecturers was the eminent criminal jurist Joachim Wilhelm Franz Philipp von Holtzendorff, the man whose teaching chair Reinhard Frank would himself occupy after 1913. He then moved on to Kiel where in 1883 he passed his Level 1 National Law Exams. After that he returned to Hessen where he undertook his Referendariat (legal apprenticeship) years in Battenberg and Marburg (along with briefer periods in Hanau and Göttingen). He seems never to have completed the Referendariat step to the point of sitting for his Level 2 National Law Exams. It was in Marburg that he came to know the distinguished reforming jurist Franz von Liszt who supervised both his doctorate (1886) and his habilitation (1887). Reinhard Frank would throughout his life hold von Liszt in the very highest regard. Frank's doctorate was received in return for a dissertation on the influence of Christian Wolff on philosophy of the natural criminal law propounded by Regnerus Engelhard. Frank expanded and republished the dissertation in 1887, now under the title "Die Wolffsche Strafrechtsphilosophie und ihr Verhältnis zur kriminalpolitischen Aufklärung des 18. Jahrhunderts" (loosely, "Wolff's philosophy of criminal law and its relationship with the eighteenth century enlightenment developments in criminal policy"). Already in 1881 he began to contribute regularly to the "Zeitschrift für die gesamte Strafrechtswissenschaft" (loosely, "Journal for all criminal law studies"), a newly launched specialist journal closely associated with Frank's mentor-supervisor, the (not infrequently controversial) Franz von Liszt. In his own contributions, both in the journal and elsewhere, Frank engaged in the then (as subsequently) endless academic arguments about classifying the varying degrees of criminal intent, taking a middle position between the views expounded by von Liszt and those set forth by Adolf Merkel.