Sergij Vilfan was born on April 5, 1919, in Trieste. He spent his youth in Bratislava, Vienna and Dubrovnik. He finished grammar school and faculty of law in Ljubljana. In 1950, he was appointed a head of Town Archives of Ljubljana, in 1971, however, a full professor of law history at the Faculty of law. In his researches, he dealt with history of measures, towns and middle classes, especially, however, with history of law. His work Pravna zgodovina Slovencev (Law History of Slovenes) (Ljubljana 1961) has been a basic work for Slovene law history. At the same time, his contribution to development of Slovene archive science was quite important. Sergij Vilfan was a member of Slovene, Austrian and Polish academies of sciences.