The University of Zurich, legal education and economics

A university founded by a democratic state (1833)

The Polytechnikum did not arrive in an academic vacuum. Zurich had possessed a cantonal university since 29 April 1833, founded in the first years of the liberal regeneration described in Chapter C.III. It has been called the first university in Europe founded by a democratic state and not by a monarch or a church. In its first semester it had 161 students, of whom 16 studied theology, 26 law, 98 medicine and 21 philosophy, taught by 26 professors and 29 private lecturers. The university seal, which shows the Grossmünster with Charlemagne, recalls the Carolinum, the old theological school of the Reformed city from which the university emerged. Women were admitted to lectures in the faculty of philosophy from 1840. In 1867 Nadezhda Suslova became the first woman in the German-speaking world to obtain a doctorate in medicine.¹

The legal faculty of the young university was closely bound up with the politics of the canton. Friedrich Ludwig Keller, a specialist in Roman law, had taught at the cantonal political institute from 1825, sat in the district court from 1826 and in the Grand Council from 1829, and presided over the Obergericht during the reform period of the 1830s. He was one of the leading figures of the liberal-radical movement after the French July Revolution of 1830, contributed to the foundation of the university and taught there as an extraordinary professor. After the conservative revolt of 1839 that overthrew the radical government, Keller left Switzerland. Through the mediation of Savigny he obtained a chair at Halle in 1843 and moved to Berlin in 1847 as professor of Roman law in succession to Puchta.² Alfred Escher, who took his doctorate in law at Zurich in 1842, belonged to the generation of students formed by this faculty.³

Johann Caspar Bluntschli, Keller's great conservative opponent in cantonal politics, taught at the university from 1833, served as its rector in 1844 and 1845 and sat in the cantonal government from 1839 to 1845. In 1840 he received the commission to draft a civil code for the canton of Zurich, the Privatrechtliches Gesetzbuch, which entered into force in stages between 1854 and 1856 and attracted attention far beyond Switzerland. Bluntschli left for Munich in 1848 and moved to Heidelberg in 1861.⁴ The Zurich code served as a model for other cantons and was a forerunner of Eugen Huber’s Swiss Civil Code.⁵ It provided the Zurich merchants and bankers of the 1850s and 1860s with a modern, systematic private law at precisely the moment when the Kreditanstalt, the Rentenanstalt and the Nordostbahn were entering into contracts of a size and complexity hitherto unknown in the canton.

Commercial law, insurance law and economics

The legal faculty adapted to the commercial development of the city in the choice of its chairs. Heinrich Fick taught commercial law and the law of bills of exchange from 1851 to 1864. Johann Jakob Treichler, a former radical politician, held the chair of Swiss private law from 1872 to 1895. Gustav Vogt taught constitutional law from 1870 to 1901. In 1892 Georg Cohn was appointed ordinary professor of German private law, legal history, commercial law, the law of bills of exchange and insurance law.⁶ The explicit mention of insurance law in Cohn's chair is telling. Because Zurich had become the leading insurance centre of Switzerland by the 1890s, the faculty responded by including the subject in a professorial remit. The combination of commercial, exchange and insurance law in one chair corresponds closely to the legal needs of the financial centre as it then existed.

Economics was taught at both institutions. In 1866 Viktor Böhmert, formerly editor of the free-trade Bremer Handelsblatt, was called as professor of political economy to the university and the Polytechnikum jointly. He taught in Zurich until 1874 and then became director of the royal Saxon statistical bureau in Dresden.⁷ Joint appointments of this kind were common in the decades when the two institutions shared Semper's building. They allowed a small city to support professors whom neither institution could have paid alone. They also created an academic community in which lawyers, economists, engineers and scientists met daily in the same corridors.

Commercial education: from the Technikum Winterthur to the chair of 1903

The Polytechnikum trained engineers and scientists. It did not offer a commercial education, and Zurich long lacked an academic institution for future merchants and bankers. The first public institution in the canton with a commercial division was the Technikum Winterthur, founded in 1874 by the mathematician and mechanical engineer Friedrich Autenheimer. It opened with 72 students and five divisions for construction, mechanical engineering, commerce, art and surveying, to which schools for chemists and electrical engineers were soon added.⁸ The Technikum was intended to train practitioners below the level of the Polytechnikum, a division of labour that anticipated the twentieth-century distinction between universities and universities of applied sciences.

The demand for academic commercial education in Zurich was voiced by the Kaufmännische Gesellschaft Zürich, which in the mid-1870s proposed either a federal commercial school or a commercial department of the Polytechnikum. The proposal failed at the time. It succeeded in 1903, when the cantonal parliament approved an extension of the faculty of political science at the university for the training of merchants and created an ordinary chair for commercial sciences. Its first holder was Johann Friedrich Schär (1846–1924), who wrote some fifty books, among them the internationally known Allgemeine Handelsbetriebslehre.⁹ Zurich thus acquired academic commercial training later than St. Gallen, whose commercial academy dates from 1898, and placed that training in the cantonal university.¹⁰ The late start illustrates a characteristic of the Zurich banking world before the First World War, which trained its own staff through apprenticeship and practice and looked to the universities mainly for lawyers.

Two institutions, one building, and the separation agreements

For half a century the University and the Polytechnikum shared Semper's building, its lecture halls and its great hall. Scientific collections accumulated over the decades belonged in part to the city, in part to the canton, in part to the Polytechnikum and in part to several owners jointly. The separation of these assets required a complex process that culminated in the agreements of 1905 and 1908. A popular vote in the canton in 1908 approved both the separation agreement and the project for the university's new building. The historians of ETH describe the same agreements as the contracts that separated the Polytechnikum from the university, the city and the canton and made a planned programme of construction possible.¹¹

The legal meaning of the separation deserves a brief comment. The arrangement of 1854, under which a federal institution operated in cantonal buildings, had been a pragmatic solution that allowed the Confederation to found a school without a construction budget. Half a century later it had become an obstacle to growth, because every extension required negotiation between the federal school board and the cantonal government. The agreements separated the buildings, collections and facilities that had until then been administered and used jointly and redistributed the responsibilities for them, which freed each side to build for its own institution.¹² The episode is an early example of the careful allocation of responsibilities between Confederation and cantons that has remained a constant theme of Swiss public finance.

Notes

1. Wikipedia (German), “Universität Zürich”, section Geschichte, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universit%C3%A4t_Z%C3%BCrich. ↩
2. “Keller, Friedrich Ludwig”, Deutsche Biographie, https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/pnd100177085.html. Keller’s Der römische Civilprozess und die Actionen (1852) is generally regarded as his principal work. ↩
3. HLS, Joseph Jung, “Escher, Alfred”, version of 26 August 2024, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/003626/2024-08-26/: legal studies in Zurich from 1837, with semesters in Bonn and Berlin (1838–1839), completed in 1842 with a doctorate under Friedrich Ludwig Keller. Escher’s education is treated in Chapter D.I. ↩
4. Wikipedia (German), “Johann Caspar Bluntschli”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Caspar_Bluntschli. Cited for orientation. ↩
5. Kurt Siehr, “Swiss Code of Obligations (OR)”, Max Planck Encyclopedia of European Private Law, https://max-eup2012.mpipriv.de/index.php/Swiss_Code_of_Obligations_(OR), on the PGB of 1853/55 as a model for other cantons, and Heinrich Mitteis, “Bluntschli, Johann Caspar”, Neue Deutsche Biographie 2 (1955), 337–338, https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz4832.html, which calls the code the forerunner (Vorläufer) of Eugen Huber’s Swiss Civil Code. ↩
6. Wikipedia (German), “Liste von Lehrstuhlinhabern an der Rechtswissenschaftlichen Fakultät der Universität Zürich”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Lehrstuhlinhabern_an_der_Rechtswissenschaftlichen_Fakult%C3%A4t_der_Universit%C3%A4t_Z%C3%BCrich. Cited for orientation. ↩
7. Wikipedia (German), “Viktor Böhmert”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_B%C3%B6hmert. Cited for orientation. ↩
8. “150 Jahre Ingenieurausbildung in Winterthur”, HAW-Erfolgsgeschichten, https://www.haw.ch/haw-erfolgsgeschichten/150-jahre-ingenieurausbildung-in-winterthur. The Technikum is the predecessor of the School of Engineering of the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW). ↩
9. “Vom Mauerblümchendasein zur Kaderschmiede”, UZH News, 2003, https://www.news.uzh.ch/de/articles/2003/0876.html. The article marks the centenary of business administration at the University of Zurich and also records the foundation of the Institute for Swiss Banking in 1968. ↩
10. University of St. Gallen, “1898: Gründung der Handelsakademie”, https://www.unisg.ch/de/universitaet/ueber-uns/geschichte/chronologie/1898-gruendung-der-handelsakademie/: on 25 May 1898 the St. Gallen Grand Council unanimously resolved to establish a Verkehrsschule and an academy for commerce, transport and administration, which opened on 3 May 1899. The academy is the predecessor of the University of St. Gallen (HSG). ↩
11. Nicolas Jene, “Die Hochschulstadt”, unimagazin no. 3/97, https://www.kommunikation.uzh.ch/static/unimagazin/archiv/3-97/hochschulstadt.html, and ETHistory 1855–2005, epoch summary “1904–1911: Vom Polytechnikum zur Hochschule”, https://www.ethistory.ethz.ch/besichtigungen/epochen/ETH05_epochen.pdf. ↩
12. ETHistory 1855–2005, epoch summary “1904–1911: Vom Polytechnikum zur Hochschule” (cited above), https://www.ethistory.ethz.ch/besichtigungen/epochen/ETH05_epochen.pdf: “Bis dahin gemeinsam verwaltete und genutzte Gebäude, Sammlungen und Einrichtungen wurden fein säuberlich getrennt, die Zuständigkeiten neu verteilt.” The physical separation of the two institutions’ buildings was completed in 1914 (Wikipedia (de), “ETH Zürich”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETH_Z%C3%BCrich). ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of September 2025.