Taranovsky, Fedir

Taranovsky, Fedir [Тарановський, Федір; Taranovs'kyj], b 24 May 1875 in Płońsk, now Poland, d 23 January 1936 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Legal historian, member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences, and corresponding member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. After graduating from Warsaw and Saint Petersburg universities he taught at Warsaw University (1899–1907), Dorpat University (1908–17), and Petrograd University (1919). In 1918 he became a member of the newly formed Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, where he chaired the department of comparative legal history. After emigrating to Yugoslavia in 1919, he taught at Belgrade University (1920–36). Taranovsky wrote a survey of the monuments of Magdeburg law in Ukrainian cities of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (1897), a critical outline of feudalism in Russia (1902), a book on the Normanist theory in the history of Russian law (1909), and a book on state law in France (1911). In 1926–7 he contributed several articles on the legal history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to Zapysky Sotsiial’no-ekonomichnoho viddilu VUAN. In the 1920s and 1930s he published several works on the legal history of the Slavs and Russians.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]