Karl Binding was a German legal scholar who taught criminal law and legal philosophy at Leipzig for four decades from the 1870s onward, becoming one of the most influential criminal law theorists of his era through his Normentheorie, the doctrine distinguishing a criminal statute' underlying norm from its penal sanction. Late in life he co-authored, with the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche, Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens of 1920, a work arguing for legal permission to end certain lives judged not worth living. The book's arguments were later invoked by Nazi authorities to justify the Aktion T4 killing program, giving Binding's academic legal theory a grim afterlife he did not live to see.
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