Snell, Johann Wilhelm

Lawyer, politician

Born: 08.04.1789 in Idstein

Died: 08.05.1851 in Bern

Snell studied law in Giessen and in 1814 was involved in the formation of the Hoffmann-Snell-Gruner-Bund, also known as the Hoffmannscher Bund, a secret political alliance that sought to unify Germany under Prussian leadership. In 1814, he joined the Nassau civil service and worked first as a court advocate and then as a judge at the court in Wiesbaden. Due to the founding of patriotic "German societies" in Idstein and Wiesbaden, he was transferred to the criminal court in Dillenburg as an examining magistrate in the fall of 1815.

In 1818, when he drafted two critical memoranda on the Nassau domain system for the towns of Dillenburg, Herborn and Haiger to the finally convened estates, he was dismissed from his post at the instigation of the district president Carl Friedrich Emil von Ibell. This hit him all the harder as he was not wealthy and already had a large family of his own. He used his involuntary leisure time to publish treatises on criminal law, which earned him an honorary doctorate from the University of Giessen and made him a name in the legal world.

In 1819, he was offered a professorship at the Russian university in Dorpat, but had to give it up again after an intervention by Ibell and was expelled from Russia. He returned to Germany with his family and fled to Switzerland in 1820 to avoid imminent arrest. In 1821 he accepted an appointment as a professor in Basel, moved to the newly opened University of Zurich in 1833 and to the University of Bern in 1834 as a professor of Roman and criminal law. Together with his brother Ludwig, he fought in the radical "Swiss National Association" for the creation of a Swiss federal state. In 1845, he was dismissed as a professor and expelled from the canton of Berne because he had promoted the formation of the "Freischarenzzug" of 1845 at popular assemblies.

He then moved to the canton of Basel-Landschaft, where he was a member of the cantonal council from 1845-48. After a new Bernese constitution came into force in 1846, he was able to return to Bern in 1849. However, he was no longer offered a professorship but continued to be politically active.