Pandectists

Pandectists were German university legal scholars in the early 1800's who studied and taught Roman law as a model of what they called Konstruktionsjurisprudenz (conceptual jurisprudence) as codified in the Pandects of Justinian (Berman).

Beginning in the mid 1800's, the Pandectists were attacked in arguments by noted jurists Julius Hermann von Kirchmann and Rudolf von Jhering who favored a modern approach of law as a practical means to an end (Weber).

In the United States, Oliver Wendell Holmes and other legal realists pushed for laws based on what judges and the courts actually did, rather than the historical and conceptual or academic law of Friedrich Carl von Savigny and the Pandectists (Rosenberg).

References

• Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition Harold J. Berman, Harvard, 1983
• On Charisma and Institution Building Max Weber, U. Chicago, 1968
• The Hidden Holmes: His Theory of Torts in History David Rosenberg, Harvard, 1996

External Links

• Civil Law Codification in the German-Speaking States of Northern and Central Europe
• The "Science" of Legal Science

See also

• Corpus Juris Civilis
• Law of Germany
• Civil code
• Roman law