Pavlos Kalligas

Pavlos Kalligas (; Smyrna, 1814 – Athens, 1896) was a Greek jurist, writer and politician, who served as professor at the University of Athens, Member and Speaker of the Hellenic Parliament, cabinet minister for Foreign Affairs, Education, Finance and Justice and chairman of the National Bank of Greece. Biography Kalligas was born in Smyrna in the Ottoman Empire in 1814, to Panagis Anninos-Kalligas, a wealthy merchant from Cephalonia, and Sofia Mavrokordatou from Chios. With the outbreak of the Greek Revolution in 1821, his father took the family to Trieste to avoid anti-Greek massacres. Pavlos Kalligas was sent to the Flanginian School in Venice and completed high school in the Heyer College in Geneva, before returning to Trieste to help in his father's commercial business. After the elder Kalligas' death in 1832, however, Pavlos abandoned commerce and turned to law, studying in the universities of Munich, Berlin and Heidelberg. In the latter he achieved his doctorate in Law under Eduard Gans and Friedrich Carl von Savigny. After completing his studies, in 1837 Kalligas came with his mother to the independent Kingdom of Greece, first at Nafplion and then at Athens, where he was elected lecturer of Natural Law at the newly founded University of Athens. In 1839 he was named lecturer of International Law and in 1843, he was named professor of Roman Law. In this capacity he became a member of the first Greek Parliament, representing the university professors as provided for by the Greek Constitution of 1844. His tenure at the university was cut short in June 1845, when he clashed with Prime Minister Ioannis Kolettis, and was dismissed from his post. Kalligas then worked for a time as a lawyer, while writing and publishing his five-volume Σύστημα του Ρωμαϊκού Δικαίου, καθ’ α εν Ελλάδι πολιτεύεται ("System of the Roman Law, as it is practised in Greece"). In 1851 he was appointed as Deputy Prosecutor in the Court of Cassation, and continued serving as a judge until 1859. In this time he served for two months in 1854 as Justice Minister in the cabinet of Alexandros Mavrokordatos. In 1860 he became legal counsel to the National Bank of Greece. In the next year, he was re-instated in the university as an extraordinary professor, before being appointed regular professor of Roman Law in 1862. Following the ousting of King Otto, Kalligas was elected a representative for Attica in the II National Assembly of 1862–64.