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Home > Journals > Michigan Law Review > MLR > Volume 25 > Issue 6 (1927)

 

Abstract

The leading exponent of juristic idealism in Germany is Rudolf Stammler, Professor in the University of Berlin. He is uncompromising in his idealistic theory. He even resents being called a pragmatic idealist, possibly lest the chameleon like connotation of this word might seem to detract in any way from the absolute character of his conception of the idea. He is to be thought of rather as the third of that great triumvirate of juristic idealists; namely, Socrates-Kant-Stammler. It is then rather a curious phenomenon that wl1en his juristic philosophy is transplanted to alien soil, it is the pragmatic element in it that seems to take root the most readily. Dean Pound says, Stammler "adds a theory of just decision of causes to the theory of making of just rules and thus raises the important problem of the application of legal rules". Again. "he sought to give us 'a natural law with growing content' and thus to make available for a new period of growth an ideal which has been perennially fruitful in legal history". Pound further quotes Stammler as saying that, if one wishes to comprehend a legal rule in its character of a means, he must ask "as to the practical value of the means when applied". Furthermore, Geny, in his discussion of Stammler's juridical doctrines, attempts to show how, according to Stammler, the "idea of justice" appears in the intermediate concepts of the "principles of just law" and then in the "model of just law", in its application to the "practice of just law". Here Stammler attempts to bring into relation with his philosophic ideal the many questions of actual life.

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