Paul Laband

Paul Laband was a German jurist widely regarded as the leading authority on public law in the period following the national unification and the establishment of the German Empire in 1871. Building on the work of Carl Friedrich Gerber, who first proposed applying Pandectist methods to public law, Laband refined and expanded upon the formalist orientation that was characteristic of the legal culture of his time. His book Das Staatsrecht des Deutschen Reiches was reprinted five times between 1876 and 1914 and is considered the most influential exposition of German constitutional law of the Wilhelmine era, as well as a paradigmatic statement of late 19th-century legal positivism. According to this view, legal science has a "constructive task" – the development and rationalisation of the legal system – in performing which it must be guided solely by legal logic, without attributing any relevance to "historical, political and philosophical" considerations.