Léon Duguit

Léon Duguit lived from 1859 to 1928 and was a leading French scholar of public law. After a period at Caen from 1882 to 1886 he was appointed to a chair of constitutional law at the University of Bordeaux in 1892, where a colleague was Émile Durkheim. Duguit developed a novel objectivist theory of public law, in amicable rivalry with his colleague Maurice Hauriou of Toulouse, that had a lasting effect on the development of that field. In Duguit's view the state was not a mythical sovereign inherently superior to its subjects, nor merely a powerful legal person, but a group of people engaged in public service, the activity of which constituted and legitimized the state; though critical of notions such as sovereignty, democracy, legal personhood, and property to the extent they were not legitimized by a social purpose, he distinguished his views from Marxism by emphasizing the function of the economy in the development of the state.