Lawyers, Liberalism, and Procedure: The German Imperial Justice Laws of 1877–79

Although Franz Schnabel described the nineteenth century as the “century of the formal Rechtsstaat,” most political and social historians of the German Kaiserreich have paid surprisingly little attention to the legal aspect of the development of society and polity. Textbooks in German history contain only brief mention of the enactment of legal reforms, either naming them without comment or subsuming them under administrative initiatives of the National Liberal party. More importantly, even standard works on the history of liberalism give precious little space to the important legislative reforms that are the focus of this essay; James J. Sheehan devotes only a paragraph to the adoption of the Imperial Justice Laws of 1877–79, and Dieter Langewiesche stresses the importance of legal unity and these reforms to liberals, but also in only one paragraph. In general, historians of German liberalism have left efforts to examine the development and unification of the German legal system after 1848 to legal historians, who are housed in Germany in the separate legal faculties and focus their work primarily on the history of legal doctrine. By failing to examine law as a historical artifact, however, political and social historians have also overlooked the Weberian message that law is a crucial analytical entry point into any understanding of modem society. Contemporary legal scholars stress that legal and social systems are inextricably intertwined, and that neither can be understood without a grasp of the other. Understanding legal discourse helps historians understand broader social discourse.