General State Laws for the Prussian States

The General State Laws for the Prussian States was a Prussian legal code of more than 17,000 articles covering civil law, penal law, family law, public law and administrative law. It was promulgated in 1792 and formally codified in 1794, developed by the jurists Carl Gottlieb Svarez and Ernst Ferdinand Klein on the orders of Frederick II, Frederick the Great. The code embodied Frederick's enlightened absolutist ambition to build a single, clear legal system across Prussian territory that would leave no room for interpretive manipulation, and it stood as a transitional framework between feudal and modern capitalist law. It ceased to function once the Stein-Hardenberg reforms of the early 19th century swept away the remaining feudal structures it had been built to accommodate. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/