Friedrich Karl von Savigny

Friedrich Karl von Savigny (born February 21, 1779, Frankfurt am Main [Germany]—died October 25, 1861, Berlin, Prussia) was a German jurist and legal scholar who was one of the founders of the influential “historical school” of jurisprudence. He advocated that the meaning and content of existing bodies of law be analyzed through research into their historical origins and modes of transformation.

Education and early career

Savigny was a descendant of landed nobility who had emigrated from Lorraine to Germany. He studied at the universities of Göttingen and Marburg, where he received his degree in 1800 and at once took up his teaching career. His wealth and social position enabled him to devote all of his considerable talents to scholarly work. In 1803 he established his reputation with Das Recht des Besitzes (Treatise on Possession; or, The Jus Possessionis of the Civil Law), a book that was the beginning of the 19th-century scholarly monograph in jurisprudence.

In 1808 Savigny went to the University of Landshut in Bavaria as a professor of Roman law, and in 1810 he was invited to the new University of Berlin, where he soon became one of the most famous and influential members of the faculty. He taught there for the rest of his career.

Legal philosophy

In 1814 the wave of German nationalism inspired by the war of liberation against Napoleon led the Heidelberg law professor A.F.J. Thibaut to demand a unified civil code for all the German states. Savigny opposed this demand for an immediate codification of German law in a famous pamphlet, “Vom Beruf unserer Zeit für Gesetzgebung und Rechtswissenschaft” (1814; “Of the Vocation of Our Age for Legislation and Jurisprudence”), that started juristic thought along a new path. To Savigny, a hasty legal codification was something to be avoided, since the one essential prerequisite for such a codification was a deep and far-reaching appreciation of the spirit of the particular community. Savigny’s jurisprudential perspective was in part inspired by the Romantic movement, which took the form in Germany of a movement harking back to the simplest tribal origins of the German people, to their folk songs and tales and to their distinctive ethos, or Volksgeist (“national spirit”). To the Romantics, the national spirit thus became the ultimate datum to be explored in its various manifestations. From this point of view law is not something that can be devised by means of rational formal legislation but rather originates in the unique spirit of a particular people and is expressed spontaneously in custom and, much later, in the formal decisions of judges. In Savigny’s classic words, law

is first developed by custom and popular faith, next by judicial decisions—everywhere, therefore, by internal silently operating powers, not by the arbitrary will of a law-giver.

Savigny viewed law as a slow, almost imperceptible growth that is formed in much the same way as a language is. Accordingly, legislation and law codes can, at most, give mere verbal expression to a body of existing law whose meaning and content can only be discovered by careful historical investigations. Historical jurisprudence opposed not only attempts at codification but also those rationalist thinkers who sought to derive legal theories from general and universal principles without respect to the characteristics and customs of a particular people. Savigny sought rather to uncover the content of existing law through historical research.

In 1815, shortly after the appearance of this epochal pamphlet, he founded, together with K.F. Eichorn and J.F.L. Göschen, the Zeitschrift für geschichtliche Rechtswissenschaft (“Journal of Historical Jurisprudence”), which became the organ of the new historical school of jurisprudence. In the same year, he began publishing his Geschichte des römischen Rechts im Mittelalter (1815–31; “History of Roman Law in the Middle Ages”). This monumental work, in which Savigny used rigorous critical techniques and consulted a vast body of primary sources, became the foundation of the modern study of medieval law.

Savigny strove to establish a German science of civil law. His approach to legal methodology was first put forward in a lecture at Marburg in the academic year 1802–03 (published in 1951 as Juristische Methodenlehre, nach der Ausarbeitung des Jakob Grimm; “Legal Methodology as Elaborated by Jakob Grimm”). He held that legal science should be both historical and systematic, meaning that it should endeavour to show the inner coherence of the material handed down in the historical sources of Roman law.

Later works

Savigny gave embodiment to his systematic approach in his eight-volume treatise, System des heutigen römischen Rechts (1840–49; “System of Modern Roman Law”), a detailed analysis of Roman law as it evolved in modern Europe. This work also contained his system of international private law.

In 1817 Savigny was made a member of the Prussian Privy Council. In 1819 he was appointed to the Berlin Court of Appeal and Cassation for the Rhine Provinces. In 1826 he became a member of the commission for revising the Prussian code, and in 1842 he gave up his teaching position to accept a ministerial post as head of the newly founded department for revision of statutes. The Revolution of 1848 ended his governmental career. In 1850 he published a collection of his monographs, Vermischte Schriften (“Miscellaneous Writings”), and in 1851–53 a two-volume work, Das Obligationenrecht (“The Law of Contracts”), a supplement to his work on modern Roman law.

Legacy

Savigny was a pioneering legal scientist who made lasting contributions to jurisprudence, particularly in revealing the continuity of present legal institutions with past ones; in laying the foundations of legal sociology; and in developing many of the critical methods that are now used by legal scholars everywhere.