Rudolf Stammler

Rudolf Stammler was a German legal philosopher who taught law at Marburg, Giessen, Halle and Berlin between the 1880s and the 1920s, becoming one of the most influential legal theorists of the early twentieth century. He distinguished the concept of law, a purely formal category, from the ideal of law, the realization of justice, arguing against most nineteenth-century legal philosophy that jurisprudence must still search for a theoretically valid standard of justice against which actual law could be measured. Stammler's doctrine of natural law with changing content held that this ideal was not fixed but reflected the degree of social harmony achievable in a given time and place, a view he developed against the Marxist claim that law simply evolves to fit a society's economic base. His major work, Die Lehre von dem richtigen Rechte of 1902, was later translated into English as The Theory of Justice.