Lashchenko, Rostyslav

Lashchenko, Rostyslav [Лащенко, Ростислав; Laščenko], b 1 September 1878 in Yelysavethrad, Kherson gubernia, d 30 October 1929 in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Historian of law. After graduating in law from Kyiv University (1905) he worked as a court official and judge (1909–17). He was elected president of the Kyiv county justices of the peace (1917), chairman of the first department of the Kyiv Court of Appeal (1918), and president of the appeals court (1919). At the same time he was a member of the Ukrainian Scientific Society in Kyiv, the Commission for the Study of Ukraine's Customary Law at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, the faculty of the Ukrainian State University of Kyiv, and vice-president of the Ukrainian Law Society (Kyiv). In 1920 he emigrated, first to Lviv and then to Prague, where he founded and presided over the Ukrainian Law Society and lectured on the history of Ukrainian law at the Ukrainian Free University and the Ukrainian Husbandry Academy in Poděbrady. Besides important articles on the Lithuanian Statute and the Pereiaslav Treaty of 1654, he wrote several monographs: Lektsiï po istoriï ukraïns'koho prava (Lectures on the History of Ukrainian Law, 2 pts, 1923–4), Tsyvil'ne pravo (Civil Law, 1925), and Kopni sudy na Ukraïni (Community Courts in Ukraine, 1926–7).

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 4 (1993).]