THE 19TH CENTURY GERMAN LEGAL SCIENCE AND ITS CONTRIBUTION TO CONTEMPORARY PRIVATE LAW

Abstract

Since its modern origins German law was ‘learned law’, a law that emanated from academic teaching and writing. The emergence of the ‘learned’ lawyers is intimately linked to the transition from medieval feudalism to the modern state in the later Middle Ages. The new concept of legal science developed by German lawyers near the beginning of the 19th century was a reaction to a particular methodological challenge. This challenge derived principally from the jurisprudential void left after Kant's critical philosophy had discredited the belief in the postulations and methods of natural law that had been pre-eminent the previous centuries. The German Pandectist School, which epitomized the foremost authority of German legal science at that time, took a revitalizing outlook to Roman law, in order to build a system of contemporary private law to meet the main requirements of the modern society. Its goal was to create a rigorously logical and comprehensive legal system by developing abstract and coherent concepts which, together as a whole, form a law that is supposed to be free from gaps. It introduced core legal concepts like the ‘declaration of intent’ and the ‘legal act’ in private law and it also had profound impact scholarship and legislation throughout Europe and beyond.