Ferdo Čulinović

Ferdo Čulinović (Karlovac, 17 May 1897 – Zagreb, 15 September 1971) was a Croatian lawyer, legal historian, university professor and academic. Born in Karlovac, he spent his childhood in Senj where he finished high school. He graduated in law and received his doctorate in 1922 from the Faculty of Law in Zagreb.

He worked as a judge and public prosecutor in several cities of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In 1943, he joined the NOP, participated in the work of ZAVNOH and after the war became a full professor at the Faculty of Law in Zagreb, where he taught civil procedural law, general history of the state and law, and history of the state and law of the peoples of Yugoslavia. He was the founder and first director of the Institute for the History of State and Law. In 1962, he was elected a full member of the JAZU, and in 1966, a corresponding member of the SANU.

In addition to extensive scientific work, Čulinović also tried his hand at literature in his younger days. In 1927, he published a collection of short stories Bura in Subotica, in which he realistically depicted social conditions, the fate of ordinary people, and legal topics arising from his judicial experience.

The bulk of his oeuvre consists of scientific works. The most important monographs are Državnopravna historija yugoslavenskih zemlja 19. i 20. vieka (I–II), Yugoslavija između dva rata, Stvaranje nove yugoslavenske države, Slom stara Jugoslavija, Peasant Uprisings in Croatia, and Occupational Division of Yugoslavia. In total, he published around 48 books and monographs and over 115 scientific papers. He was a Marxist-oriented legal historian whose works had a great influence on Yugoslav historiography of the second half of the 20th century.

He received the "Božidar Adžija" Award for Lifetime Achievement (1967) and an honorary doctorate from Moscow State University (1970).