Dolidze Isidore

Isidore Dolidze (23 March / 5 April 1915, village of Khvarbeti, present-day Ozurgeti Municipality – 17 July 1982, Tbilisi), was a Georgian legal scholar, lawyer, and historian. He was a full member of the Georgian National Academy of Sciences in 1960 and was named an Honored Scientist of Georgia in 1965. He held a Doctorate in Law (1957) and became a professor in 1958.

Dolidze studied at the Faculty of Law of Tbilisi State University (1933–1936), graduated from the Sverdlovsk Law Institute (now in Yekaterinburg) in 1938, and completed his postgraduate studies at the Moscow Law Institute in 1941. From that year, he began teaching at TSU’s Faculty of Law. He also served in a number of significant administrative and academic roles: staff member at the Soviet Embassy in London (1946–1947), Dean of the Faculty of Law and Head of the Department of State Law at TSU (1947–1948), Head of the Department of Arts under the Georgian Council of Ministers (1949–1952), Chairman of the Supreme Court of Georgia (1954–1957), Secretary of the Central Committee of the Georgian Communist Party (1957–1960), and Vice-President of the Georgian Academy of Sciences (1960–1966). From 1967, he headed the Department of Georgian Legal History at the Institute of Economics and Law of the Georgian Academy of Sciences.

Dolidze’s research focused on the history of Georgian law and most prevalent issues of related to the study of sources. His major works include: Ancient Georgian Law (1953), The Law of Giorgi the Brilliant (1957), Customary Law of Georgia (1960), and The Code of Vakhtang VI (1981), the latter of which earned him the N. Berdzenishvili Prize in 1982.

He compiled and edited the eight-volume collection of written sources called Monuments of Georgian Law (1963–1985), which includes texts, studies, annotations, a glossary, and indexes. He also edited and published N. Khizanishvili’s Selected Legal Writings (1982).

He received multiple state awards.

Literature: ისიდორე დოლიძე. ბიობიბლიოგრაფია, შემდგ.: ი. დუდუჩავა, ლ. ქირია, თბ., 1986.