Ernst Rudolf Bierling

Ernst Rudolf Bierling was a German jurist and politician who studied law in Leipzig, practiced briefly as an attorney in Zittau, and then taught as a lecturer at Gottingen before holding an ordinary professorship in church law and criminal law at the University of Greifswald from 1873 to 1901. He is regarded as the principal proponent of the recognition theory of law, which grounds the binding force of legal norms in their recognition by the legal subjects who live under them, rather than in the command of a sovereign or an external moral order. Bierling argued that the formal structure of any legal system could be studied with the rigor of the natural sciences, seeking to identify the pure formal principles of law independent of its specific content through systematic deduction. His major works, Zur Kritik der juristischen Grundbegriffe and the later Juristische Prinzipienlehre, developed this general theory of law across several decades.