Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut - Legacy

Legacy

Thibaut, a man of strong personality, was much more than a jurist: he has a place in the history of music. Palestrina and the early composers of church music were his delight; and in 1824 he published, anonymously, Über die Reinheit der Tonkunst (Purity of Music), in which he eulogized the old music, especially that of Palestrina. He was an ardent collector of old compositions, and often sent young men to Italy, at his own expense, to discover interesting musical manuscripts. Among the masters of German prose, too, Thibaut has a place. His style, though simple, is richly expressive.

The framers of the new German civil code (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch) in 1879 owed the arrangement of their matter in no small degree to Thibaut's method and clear classification, but beyond this, the code, based on the civil law of the several German states, which was adroitly blended by the usus pandectarum into an harmonious whole, does not reflect his influence. He was one of the earliest to criticize the divisions found in the Institutes, and he carried on with Gustav Hugo a controversy as to these points.

Thibaut's legal work was soon superseded by that of his successor, Karl Adolf von Vangerow (1805–1870), and his textbooks fell out of use. John Austin, who owed much to him, describes him as one "who for penetrating acuteness, rectitude of judgment and depth of learning and eloquence of exposition, may be placed by the side of Friedrich Carl von Savigny, at the head of all living civilians."