Augustus Van Dievoet


Augustus Van Dievoet was a Belgian legal historian and Supreme Court advocate. His son, Jules Van Dievoet, also a Supreme Court advocate, married Marguerite Anspach, the daughter of Jules Anspach, who served as burgomaster of Brussels in 1863-1879.

Biography

Augustus Van Dievoet studied at the Imperial Lyceum of Brussels. Van Dievoet demonstrated an exceptional capacity for academic work, excelling in his study of humanities and winning numerous prizes in Latin and Greek humanities at the College. He went on to study law at the State University of Louvain, where he received his doctorate in law on 24 March 1827.
Van Dievoet was called to the bar on 7 April 1827 and became a member of the Bar Association between 1838 and 1848. Around this time, Van Dievoet became a judge at the Court of First Instance of Brussels and a member of the Board of Discipline for lawyers at the Court of Cassation. In 1842, he moved a new home at No. 24 Rue Neuve, which he bought from the Hausmann-Hirsch family. Van Dievoet sold the property in 1847. On 3 August 1848, after twenty-one years as a lawyer at the Court of Appeal, Augustus Van Dievoet was appointed by Royal Decree an advocate of the Supreme Court.
Van Dievoet and his colleagues Hubert Dolez and Augustus Orts were the most eminent lawyers of the time. Van Dievoet is best known as one of the first historians of the law of independent Belgium. He was a student of Jean-Joseph Raepsaet, Jean-François-Michel Birnbaum, his teacher at the State University of Louvain, and Friedrich Carl von Savigny. He founded the Juridical library in the Palace of Justice of Brussels.
He was a founding member of the second Société des douze.

Publications

Van Dievoet devoted his Latin thesis at the State University of Louvain in 1827 to ancient Belgian customs. This work was a great success and was often cited in scholarly works and international works. In 1843, Adolphe Roussel commented on Van Dievoet's work in his Encyclopedia of Law: "In a remarkable thesis published in Leuven in 1827, Van Dievoet tried to find the origin of Belgian customs. Regrettably, he has not pursued this work further, which showed promise of new and ingenious views".