User:Frizbia/sandbox/Simon L. Goren

Simon L. Goren (1913 - 2000)

Simon L. Goren (born László Groszmann, November 9, 1913 - February 21, 2000) was a Jewish, Hungarian, Israeli and American academic. He was a scholar of transnational law. After military service in Hungary and barred by quota from pursuing medicine, he immigrated via Turkey to British-controlled Palestine, where he was recruited by the Haganah (Jewish defense force) to join the British colonial Palestine Police Force that was staffed by British, Jewish and Arab police officers. He rose through the ranks to become Inspector. He was the Inspector of the British Police in Haifa, Israel in 1948 when Israel won its independence and then after he was awarded his law degree, he practiced law as a prosecutor. In 1959, he immigrated with his wife Hilda and their two children to the United States.

Early Life

Goren was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to a Jewish family (Groszmann), where as a student he studied Hungarian, German and Latin. At the age of 5, he lost his father, a Hungarian officer who was captured by the Russians during World War I and sent to Siberia. His father returned to Hungary to die from a disease contracted in Siberia. Growing up in fascist Hungary, Goren was denied studying medicine by an anti-Semitic quota system, and decided immediately after military service to leave Hungary. He spent a winter in Istanbul and reached Tel Aviv in 1933.

Education

Goren graduated from the British Mandatory Governments Law School in Jerusalem. After immigrating with his family to the United States, he obtained his M.L.S. from Columbia University in 1960.

Legal and Teaching Career

Goren practiced in Israel as a prosecutor from 1949-1951 and then went into private practice in Haifa, until he immigrated to the United States in 1959.

After working as law librarian at the law firm of Cleary Gottlieb, Goren was recruited by Cornell Law School. In 1967, the recently hired Dean of Western Reserve University School of Law, Louis Toepfer, who had been brought in from Harvard, recruited Goren to serve with full faculty status as Law Librarian and Professor of Law at Western Reserve University School of Law. Goren took over a much neglected law library with inadequate space and limited resources where books were shelved indiscriminately and often based upon the appearance of their spine. In addition to remediating the shortcomings of the Law Library and putting in place a new modern classification system, Goren initiated a campaign to grow the library’s foreign collection. When Western Reserve Law School was ready to move into its new building Gund Hall, he designed the new Law Library. He also had a dual professorship appointment at the Case Western Reserve School of Library Science where he taught.

Goren was the first law librarian to recognize the value and future of computerized legal research. Under him, Western Reserve Law School was the first law school in the United States to be provided automated computer searching with the computer-assisted legal research systems. Beginning in 1971, Case Western Reserve Law students and faculty began to research on the OBAR system that had been developed by Mead Data Central and the Ohio Bar Association and eventually became LEXIS. He saw in its first experimental year that OBAR was popular among students and reported to the Dean that computerized research was totally justified. The Law School incorporated computerized legal research into its research and writing program.

In 1978-1979, the Law School was accepted by the Government Printing Office (G.P.O.) as a Federal Depository Library.

Goren’s published translations of law he has authored are in wide use by courts, attorneys and law reviews around the world. These include The German Civil Code, German Commercial Code, and Code of Civil Procedure Rules of Federal Republic of Germany.

Awards and Recognition

Goren was admitted to the Order of the Coif in 1968. He was awarded the Law Library Award from the Ohio Regional Association of Law Librarians.

Family and Personal Life

Goren met his wife-to-be Hilda Feuerstein, a refugee who had escaped Vienna after Hitler marched in. She and her brother ran the British blockade of Jewish refugees, but were caught and sent back to Vienna. When an opportunity came to Nazi Austria again, she and her brother hid out in a coal boat and successfully ran the British blockade. They had two children Daphna and Michael and a grandchild Jeremy.

Author of Published Translations into English

Simon L. Goren is the author of a number of published translations of foreign laws, including:

The German Civil Code (as amended to January 1, 1992) and the Introductory Act to the Civil Code of August 15,1896 (including amendments to January 1,1992) and the Act on Liability for Defective Products of December 15, 1989. Revised edition. Translated, with an introduction, by Simon L. Goren. Littleton, CO: Fred. B. Rothman & Co. The first edition by Ian S. Forrester, Simon L. Goren, and Hans-Michael Ilgen was published in 1975.

The German Commercial Code (1978 & 1998)

German Mining and Drilling Law (1987)

The Swiss Federal Code of Obligations/With Supplement (1987)

German Law Establishing General Terms of Business Contracts: A.G. B. Gesetz (1998)

1990 Supplement to the German Commercial Code(as Amended to January 1, 1989)

Introductory Act to the German Civil Code and Marriage Law of the Federal Republic of Germany (1976)

The Code of Civil Procedure Rules of the Federal Republic of Germanyof January 30, 1877, and the Introductory Act for the Code of Civil Procedure Rules of January 30, 1877 (1975 & 1990)

German Civil Code and the Introductory Act to the German Civil Code and the Marriage Law of the Federal Republic of Germany (1981 Supplement)

Condominium Property Law of the Federal Republic of Germany (1994)

References

Custer, Joseph A, Case Western University Law School Library: 125 Years

Podboy, Alvin, Memorial: Simon L. Goren (1913-2000)

Yohanani, Lior, Partners and Adversaries: Jewish and British Relations in the Palestine Police Force, 1936 - 1945 Israelis, Vol. 8, 2017

Sipkov, Ivan, Library of Congress, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-legal-information/article/mining-and-drilling-law-german-democratic-republic-and-the-federal-republic-of-germany-austria-and-hungary-translated-and-edited-by-simon-l-goren-new-york-london-rome-oceana-publications-inc-1987-2-vols-us-90-the-set-hardcover/8C7A49C31929F7210FE97F0D32CEFDB2