Savigny argued Germany was not ready for a single law code
In 1814, as Germans debated a unified legal code, a young Berlin professor pushed back. Law, Friedrich Carl von Savigny insisted, grows out of a nation's history and spirit, not from abstract reasoning imposed from above. His book on possession, published at 24, was hailed as the birth of modern jurisprudence.
Savigny was born in Frankfurt on 21 February 1779 into a family with Lorraine roots, and was orphaned at 13. He studied at Marburg despite poor health, toured the universities of Jena, Leipzig and Halle in the German student fashion, and took his doctorate in 1800. Three years later came his treatise on possession, Das Recht des Besitzes. The jurist Anton Thibaut called it a masterpiece that ended the uncritical study of Roman law, and Rudolf von Jhering said it recovered the Romans' own legal method. Not everyone agreed with its conclusions; Jhering himself later disputed several.
Wilhelm von Humboldt brought him to the new University of Berlin in 1810. There he set up a special tribunal that gave opinions on cases referred by ordinary courts, served as the university's third rector, and tutored the crown prince in Roman, criminal and Prussian law. He married Kunigunde Brentano, sister of the poet Clemens Brentano.
His 1814 pamphlet, usually shortened to Vom Beruf unserer Zeit, answered Thibaut's call for a unified German code. Savigny feared such a code would be shaped by natural law, which he mocked for its arrogance and shallow philosophy. Laws, he argued, must reflect the Volksgeist, the national spirit, and should be understood through the history of positive law. He also rejected the view, associated with French jurists and Bentham, that a legal system can be imposed on any country regardless of its past, and maintained that legal theory and practice suffer when separated.
With Karl Friedrich Eichhorn he founded a journal for the historical school in 1815, where he announced Barthold Niebuhr's discovery in Verona of the lost Institutes of Gaius. His six-volume history of Roman law in the Middle Ages argued that Roman law never truly died but survived in customs, towns and church teaching until its revival in Bologna. From 1842 to 1848 he led Prussia's legal system, reforming rules on bills of exchange and divorce. He died in Berlin on 25 October 1861.
Source: Friedrich Carl von Savigny
