Otto Bahr

Otto Bahr was a German legal scholar and liberal parliamentarian, born in 1817 and died in 1895. A judge who rose through the courts of Kurhessen, Prussia and the German Reich, he argued that because the state is part of society it must be subject to judgment in the same courts as individual citizens. His 1864 book Der Rechtsstaat, examining the relationship between the individual and the state from a public-law perspective, was an important step toward the development of modern administrative courts and became one of the most successful civil law monographs of the nineteenth century.