A Tribute to Dr Ralph Lansky, Library Director at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law
Dr Ralph Lansky died on his 94th birthday on 18 July 2025. It was the conclusion of a life devoted to the institution of law libraries. He maintained this devotion to the last and did great service to the field during his lifetime.
Ralph Lansky was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1931, and grew up in Poznań (Posen in the German Reich), where he spent the years from 1939–1945. He completed his Abitur in the town of Rheydt in the Rhineland and studied law at the universities of Cologne and Bonn. He passed his First State Examination in law in 1957, followed by doctoral studies culminating in a Dr. jur. in 1960. International civil procedure was the subject of his dissertation, Das Haager Übereinkommen vom 15. April 1958 über die Anerkennung und Vollstreckung von Entscheidungen auf dem Gebiet der Unterhaltspflicht gegenüber Kindern [The Hague Convention of 15 April 1958 concerning the recognition and enforcement of decisions relating to maintenance obligations towards children].
That same year, he joined the German civil service on a senior officer’s track and began training as a research librarian. He apprenticed at the Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek of Cologne and studied at the Bibliothekarlehrinstitut (now part of the Technische Hochschule), also in Cologne, where he qualified as a subject librarian two years later. From 1962–1965, he worked at the Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek of Frankfurt as an subject librarian. He then transferred to Bonn, where he ran the University of Bonn’s law faculty’s library while also serving as an subject librarian at the Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek of Bonn. He thus found himself in the not entirely straightforward position of having to wear two hats; however, he proved up to the challenge, with a knack for, as he once put it, “getting things done by maintaining good relationships with both sides and reducing friction.”
It was during his time in Bonn that Ralph Lansky, networker extraordinaire, began networking. In June 1971, he and few other colleagues joined forces to form the Arbeitsgemeinschaft für juristisches Bibliotheks- und Dokumentationswesen (the “AjBD”) [the “Working group for law library and documentation systems”], which will ring more bells when it is known that this is the German-speaking section of the International Association of Law Libraries (the IALL).
In 1972, Ralph Lansky transferred to the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg, where he was director of the law library for twenty-one years until his retirement in 1993. Before Lansky’s arrival, the Institute’s law library was already the largest German repository for collections in this area—not to mention one of the leading specialized libraries for foreign private law and private international law in the world. To lead it required a firm grasp of the global output of private law literature, staying abreast of developments in library science, and an appreciation for how the library was perceived by specialists in Germany and around the world. Ralph Lansky went about his tasks with joy and complete dedication. He and Jürgen Christoph Gödan, his deputy of many years, successfully maintained the high standard they had inherited. During Lansky’s tenure, the library’s collection more than doubled, growing from 150,000 to 315,000 volumes, and the number of guests visiting the library throughout the year—working in the library’s reading rooms and networking with one another as well as with Institute staff—grew steadily. Many long-lasting relationships and collaborations arose out of these interactions over the years. The end of Lansky’s tenure at the Max Planck Institute coincided with the new age of automation as the first online catalogue firmly established itself within the librarian’s ambit.
Seeing to the many concerns of his own library was only part of Lansky’s work. For he still placed great emphasis on networking with others in the field. He spent several years on the board of the AjBD and went on to lead various working groups, including one devoted to the legal information system JURIS and another devoted to foreign law. His efforts on behalf of the AjBD were precisely calculated, ambitious, and a crucial factor in the organization’s success; today the AjBD is an indispensable institution whose seminars and continuing education curriculum are highly valued by law librarians.
Ralph Lansky also built a substantial international network. In addition to spending time at several law libraries in the United States, he advised the Swiss Institute of Comparative Law when it was establishing its law library in the early 1980s. When the Iron Curtain fell, he helped bridge the chasm between east and west by bringing colleagues together at conferences in his birthplace of Riga as well as in Berlin: he and two American colleagues organized the conference “Ecology and Law in the Baltic Sea Area: Sources and Developments” in August 1990, a topic with plenty of currency thirty-five years later; and in October of the same year, he and two more colleagues, from Potsdam and Berlin, respectively, led the first-ever AjBD event to be attended by colleagues from the two Germanys: the “Deutsch-deutsche Begegnung der Rechtsbibliothekare und Bibliotheksjuristen” [German-German meeting of law librarians and librarian lawyers].
There are several publications for which we have Ralph Lansky to thank. Besides Mitteilungen der Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Juristisches Bibliotheks- und Dokumentationswesen [Bulletin of the AjBD] and the associated manuals and working papers, which he co-edited for many years, he made a name for himself mostly with his subject matter bibliographies, which for a time were an indispensable resource for law librarians: Bibliographie zum Bibliotheksrecht [Bibliography on library law] (1970); Handbuch der Bibliographien zum Recht der Entwicklungsländer [Handbook of bibliographies on the law of developing nations] (1977); Grundliteratur Recht: Auswahlbibliographie zur Rechtswissenschaft im allgemeinen und zum Recht der Bundesrepublik Deutschland [Foundations on law: Selective bibliography on law in general and on the law of the Federal Republic of Germany] (1974, 1978, 1984); Books in English on the Law of the Federal Republic of Germany (1979). His best-known work was Bibliotheksrechtliche Vorschriften [Rules and regulations concerning libraries], first published in 1967 in two bound editions and then from 1980–2005 in loose-leaf; not only was there a copy in just about every library director’s office in the Republic, but it was also a frequently consulted resource for librarians in training. Even after he retired from active duties at the Max Planck Institute, he continued to work, publishing additional bibliographies: Handbuch der juristischen Bibliotheken [Handbook of law libraries] (1993); Die juristischen Bibliothekarinnen und Bibliothekare in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz [Law librarians in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland] (1997); Neue juristische Bibliographien und andere Hilfsmittel [New legal bibliographies and other reference materials] (2013). Lansky also edited the German-language Wikipedia entries “Rechtsbibliothekar” [law librarian] and “Rechtsbibliothek” [law library]. Together with Gerd Hoffmann, he also co-published the index of persons in Rechtsbibliothekarinnen und Rechtsbibliothekare im deutschsprachigen und internationalen Bereich in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart [Law librarians in Germany and abroad: Past and present] (2020).
Lansky even made a record of his own publications in a work entitled Autobibliografie und ‑biografie [Autobiography, autobibliography] (2021). He was a bibliographer through and through, and to the last, and we will fondly remember him as such.
Claudia Holland, Hamburg
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Source: Gödan, Jürgen Christoph, Knudsen, Holger (eds.): Bibliothek und Recht – international. Festschrift Ralph Lansky, Arbeitshefte der Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Juristisches Bibliotheks- und Dokumentationswesen, volume 15, Augsburg 1991