Friedrich Carl von Savigny

Life and ideas

Friedrich Carl von Savigny was a German jurist, professor in Marburg, Landshut and then Berlin, and later a Prussian minister. In 1814, when some wanted a single civil code for Germany after Napoleon's defeat, he replied in a pamphlet, On the Vocation of Our Age for Legislation and Jurisprudence, that law, like language, grows slowly from the life of a people and that German law was not yet ready for codification. The task of the jurist is to study the sources, above all Roman law, and to turn them into a system. In the volumes of his System of Modern Roman Law he did that for private law, and his work on the conflict of laws influenced private international law everywhere. The Historical School he founded dominated German legal thought for most of the nineteenth century.