Ferdinand Walter
Ferdinand Walter was a German jurist, member of the Prussian National Assembly and professor at the University of Bonn.
Life
After studying at the Latin school of Mülheim on the Rhine, and later at Cologne, he fought against Napoleon I in 1814, as a volunteer in a Russian regiment. In autumn, 1814, he began to study jurisprudence at Heidelberg, where he graduated, 22 November 1817. He remained at Heidelberg as Privatdozent until Easter, 1819, where he was called to the newly founded University of Bonn. He taught various juristic branches there until 1875, when he resigned on account of blindness.A layman, Walter was a strenuous champion of the rights of the Catholic Church against civil encroachment. He was a member of the Prussian National Assembly in 1848 and of the First Chamber of Deputies in 1849. In a special pamphlet he opposed the incorporation into the criminal code of an article allowing the State to deprive the clergy of ecclesiastical rights, and on 4 October 1849, he delivered an oration in defense of ecclesiastical independence in the management of church affairs.