Franz von Benda-Beckmann (Greifswald, 29 November 1941 â Amsterdam, 7 January 2013) was a legal anthropologist who published many scholarly books and articles on legal anthropological theory and on property rights, social (in)security, and legal pluralism in developing countries. He held academic positions at the universities of Zurich, Leiden, Wageningen and Halle.
Von Benda-Beckmann studied law at the universities of Kiel, Munich and Lausanne. He then wrote his Kiel doctoral thesis Geschichtliche Entwicklung und heutige Problematik des pluralistischen Rechtssystems eines ehemals britischen Kolonialgebiets based on 11 months of field work in Malawi. After an assistantship at the Ethnological Seminar of the University of Zurich and habilitation there in general ethnology in 1979, he taught as a Privatdozent in Zurich and as a privaatdocent in Leiden.
From 1981 to 2000, he was Professor of Law in Developing Countries at Wageningen Agricultural University. His wife Keebet von Benda-Beckmann and he jointly became research directors of the Legal Pluralism Project Group (German: Projektgruppe Rechtspluralismus) at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale) in 2000, where he facilitated the establishment of the third Department of Law and Ethnology (Recht und Ethnologie).
Franz von Benda-Beckmann published 29 books and 266 articles, in part in co-authorship with his wife Keebet von Benda-Beckmann. He was active in national and international committees, such as the International Commission on Legal Pluralism of the International Union of Ethnological and Anthropological Sciences which he co-founded with his wife.
Leipzig University appointed him Honorary Professor of Ethnology in 2002. In 2004 he became Honorary Professor of Legal Pluralism at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg.
Von Benda-Beckmann published many scholarly books and articles, including: