thumb|right|200px|Portrait of Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut by an unknown artist
Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut (4 January 177220 March 1840) was a German jurist and musician.
Early life
He was born at Hamelin, in Hanover, the son of an officer in the Hanoverian Army, of French Huguenot descent. After school in Hamelin and Hanover, Thibaut entered the University of Göttingen as a student of jurisprudence, went from there to Königsberg, where he studied under Immanuel Kant, and afterwards to the University of Kiel, where he was a fellow-student with Niebuhr. Here, after taking his degree of doctor of laws, he became a Privat-dozent. His younger brother was Bernhard Friedrich Thibaut, a mathematician.
Jurist
Early career
thumb|200px|Grave in Heidelberg
In 1798 he was appointed extraordinary professor of civil law, and in the same year appeared his Versuche über einzelne Theile der Theorie des Rechts (1798), a collection of essays on the theory of law, of which by far the most important was entitled Über den Einfluss der Philosophie auf die Auslegung der positiven Gesetze, wherein he sought to show that history without philosophy could not interpret and explain law. In 1799, he published his Theorie der logischen Auslegung des römischen Rechts, one of his major works. In 1802 he published a short criticism of Feuerbach's theory of criminal law, which recalls in many ways the speculations of Jeremy Bentham. The same year appeared Über Besitz und Verjahrung, a treatise on the law of possession and the limitation of actions.