About Vladimír Mandl
Vladimír Mandl (20 March 1899 – 8 January 1941) was a Czech lawyer and university lecturer. In 1932, he authored Das Weltraum-Recht: Ein Problem der Raumfahrt (Space Law: A Problem of Space Travel), the first stand-alone treatise on space law, which preceded the launch of Sputnik 1 by 25 years. For this work, some scholars consider him as the "father of space law". Born in Plzeň in Bohemia, then part of Austria-Hungary, Mandl studied law in Prague and Erlangen–Nuremberg. He practised as a lawyer from the 1920s and taught law at the Czech Technical University, until all Czech universities were closed following the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939. According to research by Michal Plavec of the National Technical Museum in Prague, Mandl held strong antisemitic views and published antisemitic articles in the nationalist newspaper Venkov from December 1938, though no evidence of collaboration with Nazi Germany has been found. Mandl published on a wide range of legal topics in Czech, German, French and English, with a particular focus on private law, transportation law and aviation law. He died of tuberculosis on 8 January 1941, aged 41. Mandl authored the first stand-alone treatise on space law in 1932. Before Mandl reached his fourteenth birthday, he is said to have built his first Blériot-type monoplane thus showing a keen interest into modern transportation from an early age. Following graduation, Mandl became a prolific writer on a range of legal topics, with a particular focus on private law issues and the legal aspects of technological innovations. He published works on a variety of topics in Czech, German, French and English, focusing especially on private and transportation law issues.
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