Sadness at passing of former University President, Emeritus Professor Hans-Ludwig Schreiber

No. 31 - 27.10.2021

The Göttingen legal scholar and former President of the University of Göttingen, Emeritus Professor Hans-Ludwig Schreiber, passed away last weekend at the age of 88. Born in Mönchengladbach, he accepted a professorship for criminal law and general legal theory at the Faculty of Law of the University of Göttingen in 1972. His main areas of expertise included bioethics and voluntary euthanasia, culpability and guilt according to criminal law, and forensic psychiatry. The University thus not only gained one of the most important criminal lawyers of his time, but Professor Schreiber also put himself in the service of his University in 1981 when he took up the office of Deputy Rector.

He also had the ability to link criminal law theory with legal practice in a complex way. However, this was just one of the abilities that led his career path to Lower Saxony’s Ministry of Science and the Arts where he was State Secretary from 1987 to 1990. Professor Schreiber was chosen because he "has a good reputation with the universities, but at the same time he has the talent to cause pain to the universities as required by the financial situation" – as the press reported at the time. Due to his special knowledge of both ministerial and university processes, he succeeded in mastering the almost traditional "confrontation" between the two institutions with great skill and admirable tact.

In 1992, Professor Schreiber became, in fact, just the second president of the University of Göttingen. His motto that the main task of a university president is to “at least not hinder positive developments” shows his sense of humour on the one hand, but in no way does justice to his achievements. He led the University very successfully with great ability and empathy through times that demanded strict austerity because of increasingly scarce resources. Until the end of his term in 1998, he thus laid the foundations for the future successful developments of the very university that he himself had attended. Furthermore, Professor Schreiber was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Volkswagen Foundation for ten years, and until 2006 he was Chairman of the Standing Commission on Organ Transplantation of the German Medical Association.

The University of Göttingen is greatly saddened by the death of Hans-Ludwig Schreiber, scientist, university manager and remarkable individual, and will honour his memory.