Soma Visontai (1854–1925) was Hungarian lawyer and deputy. Visontai was born in

Gyöngyös Gyöngyös (; german: Gengeß) is a town in Heves county in Hungary, east of Budapest. Situated at the foot of the Sár-hegy and Mátra mountains, it is the home of numerous food production plants, including milk production and sausage factori ...

on 9 November 1854 as Soma Weinberger, the son of Albert Weinberger and Julianna Schweitzer. He was educated at

Budapest Budapest (, ; ) is the capital and most populous city of Hungary. It is the ninth-largest city in the European Union by population within city limits and the second-largest city on the Danube river; the city has an estimated population ...

, where he changed his name in 1881 and became an attorney in 1882. While still a student he attracted much attention by his papers on

political economy Political economy is the study of how economic systems (e.g. markets and national economies) and political systems (e.g. law, institutions, government) are linked. Widely studied phenomena within the discipline are systems such as labour ...

in the scientific journals of

Hungary Hungary ( hu, Magyarország ) is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning of the Pannonian Basin, Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the ...

, and he also edited the ''Vasút.'' He became widely known as a pleader in 1890, when he successfully defended the editor of the ''Zasztava,'' the leader of the radical wing of the

Serbians The term Serbians in English is a polysemic word, with two distinctive meanings, derived from morphological differences: * Morphology 1: Serb- ian- s, derived from the noun ''Serb'' and used interchangeably to refer to ethnic Serbs, thus havi ...

in Hungary, in a trial for political murder. As a mark of gratitude, the people of Neusatz, being Serbian sympathizers, elected Visontai in 1892 to the Hungarian Parliament as a supporter of Kossuth; and since 1899 he represented his native town, Gyöngyös, in Parliament. He was an eminent authority on criminal law and a member of the board of examiners for admission to the bar; and he prepared a large portion of the preliminary drafts for the criminal code.

References

* 1854 births 1925 deaths Hungarian Jews Hungarian jurists Members of the House of Representatives (Hungary) People from Gyöngyös {{Hungary-law-bio-stub