The Center for Civil Law Studies of the LSU Paul M. Hebert Law Center presents the 20th John H. Tucker, jr. Lecture in Civil Law

Professor Athanassios N. Yiannopoulos
(Tulane University)
The Civil Code and Social Change
(53 La. L. Rev. 5)

The 20th Tucker lecturer, Professor Athanassios N. Yiannopoulos, needs no
introduction to Louisiana lawyers. Professor, author, and juris consult, he
is universally recognized as this state’s prominent expert on the law of property,
and he is active in several other fields of Louisiana law as well. He is presently
W.R. Irby Professor of Law at Tulane University, and author of 11 books and
over 60 articles on various legal subjects, most of them civilian in nature.
He has served as a reporter for various portions of the Louisiana State Law
Institute’s ongoing revision of the Louisiana Civil Code continuously
since 1975, and, as such, he has authored six major revision acts during that
period-the most recent of these being an enactment of a new title of the Civil
Code on ownership in division that was adopted by the legislature in 1990. For
invaluable intellectual services that he rendered to his country of origin,
he was honored with the Order of the Phoenix, Gold Cross, by the Republic of
Greece.

Professor Yiannopoulos was born in Thessaloniki, Greece in 1928, and received
his diploma in law from the University of Thessaloniki in November of 1950 with
top honors. He began his legal career as a practitioner in Athens. In 1953,
he received a Fulbright Fellowship to pursue an advanced law degree in the United
States, thus beginning an American and European academic career that he has
pursued ever since with great distinction. In 1954, Professor Yiannnopoulus
received an M.C.L. from the University of Chicago School of Law, and he earned
LL.M. and J.S.D. degrees from the School of Law of the University of California
in 1955 and 1956. He received his Doctor of Jurisprudence from the School of
Law of the University of Cologne in 1960. That degree was awarded magna
cum laude.

Professor Yiannopoulos began to turn his academic attention to Louisiana legal
matters in 1958, when he became a research associate at the Louisiana State
University Law School, and 1959, he published his first article on a Louisiana
legal subject (mandate), in the Louisiana Law Review. He has continued
to publish prolifically on Louisiana legal subjects in the ensuing years, and
in 1963, became a full professor at LSU, where he remained until 1979. During
these years, he taught several law school generations the subjects of property,
matrimonial regimes, and civilian theory with wit, charm, and an authoritative
grasp of the material that has seldom been equaled. In 1979, he moved to the
Tulane University Law School, where he has continued to hold forth with equal
mastery.

Our lecturer’s best-known writings are probably his Civil Law Property (3d edition 1991), and his convenient yearly editions of the Louisiana Civil
Code. He is, however, also the author of a Civil Law Property Course
book (5th ed. 1990) and Matrimonial Regimes Course book (1978),
and of the work that is still the standard introduction to civilian theory for
Louisiana law students, the Louisiana Civil Law System (1978). His
most important and lasting contribution to Louisiana has undoubtedly come, however,
in the form of six law-revision enactments that he has produced since 1977.
These enactments, drafted with the help of committees of prominent members of
the Louisiana bench and bar under the aegis of the Louisiana State Law Institute,
have revised and updated the portions of the Louisiana Civil Code dealing with
the following subjects: Things and Modification of Ownership (Acts
1977, No. 169); Occupancy, Possession, and Prescription (Acts 1982,
No. 187); Preliminary Title (Acts 1987, No. 124); Natural and Judicial
Persons (Acts 1987, No. 127); and Absentees (Acts 1990, No. 190).