Georg Friedrich Puchta (31 August 17988 January 1846) was a German Legal scholar.

Biography

Born on 31 August 1798 at Kadolzburg in Bavaria, Puchta came of an old Bohemian Protestant family which had immigrated into Germany to avoid religious persecution. His father, Wolfgang Heinrich Puchta (1769–1845), a legal writer and district judge, imbued his son with legal conceptions and principles. From 1811 to 1816 Puchta attended the Egidiengymnasium at Nuremberg, during the headmastership of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, an eminent German philosopher.

In 1816 Puchta began his legal studies at the University of Erlangen, where—in addition to being initiated by his father into legal practice—he fell under the influence of the writings of Savigny and Niebuhr. At this time the famous Christian Friedrich von Glück lectured there. Puchta said about the faculty of Erlangen: "". (Translation "Every university certainly is plagued with a thorn in the flesh, but the faculty here, when Glück dies, will have nothing but thorns.") Taking his doctorate (Dissertatio de Itinere, Actu et Via) and his habilitation in Roman Law at Erlangen,

Leaving Erlangen, Puchta was appointed full Professor of Roman Law at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich) in 1828. He stayed in Munich until he moved to the University of Marburg in 1835 to become a professor of Roman and Ecclesiastical Law (). In 1837, he left Marburg to become a Professor for Legal Scholarship at Leipzig University ().