Abstract

The 19th century offered a special challenge to law and legal profession in Germany: On the one side after the end of the Holy Roman Empire Germany was devided into dozens of sovereign states, on the other side there was a growing economic need for unified civil law. As there was no political possibility for a codification like in France, the German professors of law, led by F. C. von Savigny and his conception of a legal science on the basis of philosophy and history, formed the rules of civil law for a modern society founded on Roman and medieval German law. This effort, far from a mere interpretation of a legal code, joined the legal science to the flourishing German ancient and medieval history of that time, integrating the lawyers as well into the concept of higher education of the developing German middle class as into the political movements toward a national unification on the basis of a liberal constitution. At the same time the concept of a legal system, taken from the natural law theory of the 17th and 18th century, seemed to make law a science comparable to natural and technological sciences and integrated the legal profession the conception of progress . At the end of the century, the great national legal codifications brought the fulfillment of many of these aspirations; but, at the same time, the political and cultural ideals of this movement faded, giving place to a mere legal positivism. Only a small elite of scholars tried to use their historical legal education for developing a sociological and political conception of law