Schlesinger was the son of a
lawyer and a relative of
bankers. He was born in
Munich,
Bavaria,
Germany, in 1909. His father was American, which is why Schlesinger acquired dual citizenship per
jus sanguinis. As he was growing up, he exhibited especial intellectual abilities, but also a great interest for sports and art. He completed his
doctoral thesis on
commercial law, earning his degree in law from the
University of Munich in 1933. He then worked as a lawyer for the bank that years before had been founded by his predecessors. He developed a background in finance while also helping German
Jews transfer their assets out of the country in order to escape
Nazi persecution. In 1938, with the Nazi party gaining strength, Schlesinger, who was Jewish, emigrated to the United States. Soon, he enrolled in the
Columbia Law School, where he became the first, and perhaps the only, non native English speaking editor of the
Columbia Law Review. He graduated first in his class in 1942 and started working as an assistant to a
New York Supreme Court judge. He briefly worked at
Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, a renowned New York law firm; however, in 1948 he moved into academia and started teaching in the
Cornell Law School, where he later became a professor of comparative law. He also wrote important studies of
civil procedure and international business transactions and directed a ten-year international research project on
contracts. In 1975 he left, as Professor Emeritus, and became a professor in the
University of California's
Hastings College of the Law, until his retirement in 1995. Schlesinger and his wife, Ruth Hirschland Schlesinger, both died on November 10, 1996, in
San Francisco, California, an apparent double suicide. == Schlesinger and comparative law ==