Ministerial Proposal in the Matter of the Dissolution of the Royal Legal Academy of Law in Nagyszeben Before (I) Franz Josef and its Parliamentary Antecedents. The publication of the source material—an archival file from the Haus-, Hof- and Staatsarchive in Vienna—makes available for those interested hitherto unknown material. The Academy of Law in Nagyszeben, which was established in 1844 and which was first maintained by the Transylvanian Saxon Universitas, then, in the age of neoabsolutism, by the Austrian state, was subordinated after 1867 to the Hungarian Ministry of Culture, and was recognized as one of the most well-equipped legal schools of the age. The central unit of the source document contains the German text of the proposal, in which Minister of Religion and Education Ágoston Trefort (between 1872 and 1888) appealed, in November 1883, to Franz Josef I to accept in supreme resolution the idea of the possible discontinuance of the educational institution in Nagyszeben. What makes the
document unique is the fact that the relevant materials of the Ministry of Religion and Education relating to universities and colleges in the period after the Compromise and before 1916 were destroyed, thus the document in question may be the only extant copy of the proposal. Trefort’s proposal is complemented and commented upon by the parliamentary speeches which, between 1870 and 1884, either called in doubt or, contrariwise, underscored the necessity for existence of the Academy of Law in Nagyszeben. For want of other sources, the records of these speeches highlight those incentives which in a certain sense were contributory to forcing Trefort to back down and to ”sacrifice” the institution of Nagyszeben. These parliamentory documents are also made available in the present study.