Stefan Grundmann and Karl Riesenhuber (eds), Private Law Development in Context: German Private Law and Scholarship in the 20th Century

Document Cited in Related
DOI10.3366/elr.2021.0682
Published date01 January 2021
Date01 January 2021
Pages132-135
Author

The origins of this collection of biographies of thirty-seven of the most distinguished German professors of private law working in German and Germany or Austria in the last century (some still alive in 2020) lie in a series of lectures held in the Humboldt University of Berlin between 2005 and 2009 (so far as can be told from the footnote giving their place and dates found at the start of most but not all the book's chapters). The collection was first published in German in 2010, so this translation comes some time after that. This does not lessen its considerable value and interest; it is much more than a Who Was Who of German private law. The editors’ aim is to explore the role of these jurists in the development of private law, not only in Germany but also in international and comparative settings. The biographies are grouped, with Ernst Rabel and Franz Böhm receiving their own section as overall founding fathers, and the others being gathered under separate heads of “Methods” (considering legal history, comparative law and legal theory), “Business Law, Economic Theory and Transnational Law”, and “Private Law, Doctrinal Thinking and System Building”. While academia is probably the most prominent driving force in the development of private law in Germany, it is argued that its engagement with issues of theory, the light cast by other disciplines, notably economics and sociology, and international legislation (including the European Union in the second half of the twentieth century) has also made German private law scholarship highly influential around the world, and not just in the German-speaking one. (That said, it is apparent from the text that at least some German thinking has not been sufficiently well-known; thus, for example, it is said (190) that Josef Esser anticipated the ideas in Ronald Dworkin's Taking Rights Seriously (1977) by some twenty years while pointing out limitations on those ideas which Dworkin never saw.)

The editors’ method is a self-avowedly subjective choice of individuals, guided however by the recognition of each in the preparation of a festschrift by which the community of colleagues in Germany recognised the honorand's particular contribution as substantial. The contributors invited to write about each individual are Schüler (followers, disciples) of their Lehrer (teachers, mentors), reflecting Germany's powerful tradition of “schools” emanating from particular individuals and creating what the editors term “a strong link between generations”. The risk that the results will be panegyrics of their subjects rather than wholly detached and objective analyses is acknowledged; and this reader's impression is that the risk is generally well managed, with the contributors where necessary (and this is...

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