Sergei Andreevich Muromtsev

Born Sept. 23 (Oct. 5), 1850, in St. Petersburg; died Oct. 4 (17), 1910, in Moscow. Russian lawyer, publicist, and political figure.

Born into the gentry, Muromtsev graduated in 1871 from the faculty of law of Moscow University, where he was a docent from 1875 and a professor of Roman law from 1877. In 1884 he was deprived of his chair for “political unreliability.” He then became a member of the bar attached to the Moscow Court of Appeals. He became known as a prominent attorney-at-law. Muromtsev used the pages of the journal Iuridicheskii Vestnik, of which he was editor from 1879 to 1892, to advocate constitutional reforms. From 1897 he sat in the Moscow City Duma and figured in the zemstvo (local self-government) and municipal congresses of 1904–05. Muromtsev was one of the founders of the Cadet (Constitutional Democratic) Party and a member of its central committee from October 1905. He assisted in drafting the Basic Law of the Russian Empire (Apr. 23, 1906), as well as a number of Cadet-sponsored laws on civil liberties. In 1906 he was elected a member of the First State Duma and became its chairman. In Vyborg on July 9–10,1906, Muromtsev chaired the meeting at which the Vyborg Appeal was drawn up. Between 1908 and 1910 he was a lecturer at the Shaniavskii University in Moscow.

Muromtsev’s works on the history of Roman and civil law and on the general theory of law were written from a positivist viewpoint.