Jules Liégeois

Jules Joseph Liégeois (30 November 1833 — 14 August 1908), Knight of the Legion of Honour ("Chevalier de l'Ordre de la Légion d'Honneur"), and the Professor of administrative law at the University of Nancy for forty years, was a universally respected French jurist who was also widely known as an important foundation member, promoter, and defender of the Nancy School of Hypnosis — some would even say "the founder" of the School, not "just a participant" (Touzeil-Divina, 2024a).

In addition to his numerous influential publications on administrative law and the relationship between economics and the law, he was internationally recognized for the significance, scope, and systematic nature of his critical and innovative personal investigations into natural/spontaneous somnambulism, hypnotism, and hypnotic suggestion in the wider medico-legal domain. He "was the first forensic scientist to scientifically address the medical question of hypnotism", and "was the leading researcher in the nineteenth century into the possibilities of the abuse of hypnosis for the purposes of crime", not only in the sense of crimes committed upon a hypnotized subject, and those committed by a hypnotized subject, but also in the sense of the hypnotized subject having no memory of either their hypnotization or their subsequent activity, as a direct consequence of the hypnotist's suggestions.

"Besides doing successful work in economics, [Professor Jules Liégeois] has put both psychologists and jurists in his debt by his pioneer studies of hypnotism and suggestion in their medico-legal aspects." — The American Journal of Psychology (January 1910).