Hugo Preuß

Hugo Preuß (1860 to 1925) was a German lawyer, constitutional scholar and liberal politician, the author of the draft of the Weimar Constitution. Born in Berlin to a Jewish family, he studied law and political science at Berlin and Heidelberg and took his doctorate of law at Göttingen in 1883. Although his writing was valued, his Jewish religion and democratic-liberal views kept him from a tenured chair at the University of Berlin, and he became a full professor only in 1906 at the Berlin School of Commerce, where he taught constitutional law and local self-government and later served as headmaster. After the revolution of 1918 Friedrich Ebert appointed him state secretary of the Interior Ministry with the task of drafting a republican constitution; he became Interior Minister in February 1919 and later commissioner for constitutional issues. He based his draft on three principles, popular sovereignty, a federal organization of the state and a democratic Rechtsstaat within the international community, and his ideas strongly shaped the parts of the constitution on parliament, government and president. He sat in the Prussian assembly and Landtag until his death in 1925.