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Backhaus, Jürgen G. --- "Otto von Gierke (1841-1921)" [1999] ELECD 34; in Backhaus, G. Jürgen (ed), "The Elgar Companion to Law and Economics" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 1999)

Book Title: The Elgar Companion to Law and Economics

Editor(s): Backhaus, G. Jürgen

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781858985169

Section: Chapter 27

Section Title: Otto von Gierke (1841-1921)

Author(s): Backhaus, Jürgen G.

Number of pages: 3

Extract:

27 Otto von Gierke (1841-1921)
Jiirgen G. Backhaus


Otto von Gierke was born in Stettin, the son of a Prussian official. He studied
law at the University of Berlin and held professorships at the universities of
Breslau ( 1872-84), Heidelberg (1884-7) and Berlin (1887 until his death).
He is generally described as having formulated, on the basis of the writings
of Jacob Grimm (1785-1863), a specific Germanist school of law, as opposed
to the Romanists.

At the beginning of Gierke's career, German legal scholarship was dominated by
the Romanist school of Savigny; but Gierke began and remained a stong Germanist.
The Germanists, like the Romanists, were historically minded; their research,
however, did not take them back to the Roman empire, Justinian's code, and the
reception of that code, but followed the path marked out by Jacob Grimm to the
law of the ancient German Mark and the Gemeinde (local community) to feudal
records, town charters, the rules of guilds in search of `truly German' and legal
principles. The first volume of Gierke's Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht(1868-
1913) ... was the first product of his self- imposed task of broadening the foundation
for a German theory of associations by a detailed study of successive types of
organizations in German history. (Lewis, 1968)

From an economic point of view, the emphasis should not be on the specific
nationality of the German law. The emphasis of this empirical research is rather
on the law as it has developed ...