Course notes made by an unkown student of lectures on criminal law at Leuven University by Jean-François-Michel Birnbaum (1792-1877) between 1817 and 1830. He was a German professor of criminal law. In 1813 he moved to the University of Landshut. He studied there with well-known legal scholars, such as Paul Johann Anselm von Feuerbach, Carl Joseph Anton Mittermaier and Friedrich Carl von Savigny. He was most influenced by Mittermaier (1787-1867), who was barely five years older, but had been professor of law at Landshut since 1810. In 1815, Birnbaum defended his dissertation, which earned him the title of doctor, but which also received a controversial reception. In 1817 he was appointed as professor at the law faculty of the new University of Leuven. King Willem I of the Netherlands had agents in Germany who looked for well-known scientists for him to staff the new state universities of Ghent, Liège and Leuven. One of them was Baron Hans Christoph Ernst von Gagern, whom Birnbaum had gotten to know. He introduced the only twenty-four-year-old as a candidate for a professorship in Leuven. He may be appointed as a reserve candidate because more important legal sholars who had been approached had refused the post. Birnbaum proved to have considerable adaptability, both in the use of languages and in the method of teaching. Here his comparative law studies that he had undertaken with Mittermaier came in extremely handy. As a result he was commissioned to draw up a new Dutch criminal code. In 1824-1825 he was rector magnificus of the university. He worked to organize exchanges of professors and students with neighboring universities. He stayed at Leuven University untill 1830, when he returned to Germany to learn at the Universities of Bonn (1830), Freiburg im Breisgau (1933), Utrecht (1835) and Gießen (1840).