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Fleckeisen studied at Göttingen under Ernst von Leutsch (1808-87) and Friedrich Schneidewin (1810-56), who introduced him to text criticism. He later adopted the methods of his mentor and friend Friedrich Ritschl (1806-76) of Bonn to whom he acknowledged his debt in the “Epistula critica ad F. Ritschelium” affixed to his (incomplete) edition of Plautus.  and Terence (1857, 2^nd ed., 1898). His Exercitationes Plautinae analyzed the language of Plautus before Eduard Fraenkel’s Plautinisches im Plautus (1922). He dedicated “Plautinische analecten” to Schneidewin, explaining that his readings arose from his research on Plautine language and meter rather than manuscript readings.  Fleckeisen’s most lasting legacy is his role working with Karl Felix Halm (1809-82) director of the royal library at Munich, and August Schmitt, the head of the publishing house G.B. Teubner, to initiate the Bibliotheca Teubneriana in 1849. The idea was to produce useful low-cost texts of Greek and Latin authors. Halm contributed a number of editions and Fleckeisen a text of ten comedies of Plautus. Sandys called his text of Terence “the first important advance since the time of Bentley. In 1855 Fleckeisen took over the editorship of the Jahrbücher für Philologie und Pädagogik with which he was so identified that the annual became known as "Fleckeisen's Yearbook."