Dr. Erna Scheffler

Title: Dr.
Prename: Erna
Surname: Scheffler
Name of birth: Friedenthal
Profession: Jurist
Birthday: 09/21/1893
Place of birth: Breslau (Wroclaw)
Date of death: 05/22/1983
Place of death: London
Married to: Dr. Fritz Haslacher (divorced 1917); Georg Scheffler (1945-1976)
Profession husband: 1. husband: lawyer 2. husband: federal judge
Education: 1911–14 university studies (law) in Breslau, Munich, and Berlin; 1914 doctorate in Breslau; 1922 and 1925 state examinations in Breslau
Career: 1912–24 legal adviser for a relief organization and lawyer in Breslau; 1914–18 assistant in the German administration in Brussels and Antwerp; 1925–28 lawyer in Berlin; 1928–33 judge at the municipal court in Berlin-Mitte; 1933 dismissed and until 1945 occupational ban; 1933–45 keeps accounts for a friend’s shop, spends the last months of the war hidden in a garden summerhouse; after the war appointed leading judge at the regional court of Berlin; 1948 director of the Düsseldorf administrative court; 1951–63 judge at the Constitutional Court; legal adviser in the Standing Committee of Interior Ministers in the German Bundestag
Memberships: From 1949 German Federation of University Women (DAB), 1964–70 DAB president and vice president of the German Union of Women Jurists (Deutscher Juristinnenbund); founding member of the German branch of the International Federation of Business and Professional Women; Soroptimist International Club Karlsruhe; 1963–70 represents the German university women’s organizations in the International Federation of University Women (IFUW) and the International Federation of Women Lawyers
Biographical literature: Erhard H.M. Lange, “Dr. Erna Scheffler, geb. Friedenthal (1893–1983). Eine Breslauerin – erste Richterin am Bundesverfassungsgericht,” *Jahrbuch der Schlesischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Breslau* 42–44 (2001–03): 521–57; Walther Killy and Rudolf Vierhaus, *Deutsche Biographische Enzyklopädie*, vol. 8 (Munich: Saur, 1998)
Major works: “Straftilgende Maßnahmen,” diss., Schlesische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Breslau (1915); *Die Gleichberechtigung der Frau* (Tübingen: Mohr, 1951); *Die Stellung der Frau in Familie und Gesellschaft im Wandel der Rechtsordung seit 1918* (Frankfurt/Main: Metzner, 1970)