Sergey Muromtsev
Encyclopedia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
n lawyer and politician, and chairman of the First Imperial Duma in 1906.
Muromtsev was a Russian nobleman from Tula
Tula, Russia
Tula is an industrial city and the administrative center of Tula Oblast, Russia. It is located south of Moscow, on the Upa River. Population: -History:...
and a Professor of Roman Law
Roman law
Roman law is the legal system of ancient Rome, and the legal developments which occurred before the 7th century AD — when the Roman–Byzantine state adopted Greek as the language of government. The development of Roman law comprises more than a thousand years of jurisprudence — from the Twelve...
at Moscow University. In 1893, he and his wife Marya built the Muromtsev Dacha
Muromtsev Dacha
The Muromtsev Dacha is a wooden dacha built at the end of the 19th century in Moscow’s southern Tsaritsyno District and largely rebuilt in the 1960s ....
in Moscow. In the late 19th century, he was among the creators of the Constitutional Democratic Party, better known as the KD or Cadet
Constitutional Democratic party
The Constitutional Democratic Party was a liberal political party in the Russian Empire. Party members were called Kadets, from the abbreviation K-D of the party name...
party, of which he was chairman for several years. In April 1906, he was elected as a representative for Moscow in the First Duma, of which he was then elected chairman (or president) on May 10. He tried to maintain some degree of order and dignity in this difficult assembly, which is often known as the "Duma of the Public Anger". He was much praised for the way he chaired the debates, always keeping to the strictest legality, but always pursuing a constitutional and anti-autocratic
Autocracy
An autocracy is a form of government in which one person is the supreme power within the state. It is derived from the Greek : and , and may be translated as "one who rules by himself". It is distinct from oligarchy and democracy...
agenda. Despite his efforts, the Duma was dissolved on July 21, 1906, by Imperial ukase
Ukase
A ukase , in Imperial Russia, was a proclamation of the tsar, government, or a religious leader that had the force of law...
of tsar
Tsar
Tsar is a title used to designate certain European Slavic monarchs or supreme rulers. As a system of government in the Tsardom of Russia and Russian Empire, it is known as Tsarist autocracy, or Tsarism...
Nicholas II. Muromtsev wanted the elected Duma to continue its work and proposed that it should retreat to Finland
Finland
Finland , officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.Around 5.4 million people reside...
. For signing this appeal, he was imprisoned for some months and could not be re-elected in the later Dumas.
His funeral at the New Donskoy Cemetery on October 7, 1910 was the occasion of one of the first public demonstrations of support for constitutional ideas since the dissolution of the Duma. His niece, Vera Muromtseva, was the wife of Ivan Bunin, a celebrated Russian author.
Contributions to Jurisprudence
In the 1870s, he advanced the then-novel sociological approach for the study of law, employing the functional (функционального) and historical comparative ("историко-сравнительного") methods. Muromtsev was a staunch opponent of formalism and positivism.From 1879 to 1892, Muromtsev was the co-editor, along with Maksim Kovalevsky
Maksim Kovalevsky
Maksim Maksimovich Kovalevsky was a sociologist and professor of Legal History at the University of St Petersburg.He studied at the University of Kharkov under Dmitri Kachanovsky....
of the law journal "Juridical Vestnik" («Юридический Вестник»).