August Thon

August Thon was a German jurist of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who studied at Jena, Gottingen and Heidelberg before earning his doctorate at Jena in 1861. He held a professorship in Roman law at the University of Rostock beginning in 1873 and later taught at Jena. Thon's central contribution to legal theory was his 1878 work Rechtsnorm und subjektives Recht, examining the relationship between the legal norm and the subjective right it creates, a foundational question in German general legal doctrine. His analysis of how legal norms translate into individual rights and duties influenced German jurisprudential theory into the twentieth century.