Ernst Fuchs (lawyer)

Ernst Fuchs (born October 15, 1859 in Weingarten near Karlsruhe , † April 10, 1929 in Karlsruhe) was a German lawyer and freelance lawyer .

Life

Ernst Fuchs grew up as the son of a strictly religious, Jewish cattle dealer in a large family. In 1871 the family moved to Karlsruhe. There he attended the Grand Ducal Gymnasium . In order to skip another class, he moved to a grammar school in Heilbronn. From 1876 to 1880 he studied law at the Universities of Heidelberg and Strasbourg . In 1884 he was admitted to the Karlsruhe Regional Court . He defended socialists in the time of the socialist laws . In 1894 he became a lawyer at the Karlsruhe Higher Regional Court . Fuchs belonged to Reform Judaism . So he suggested that the state move the Sabbath to Sunday. The strict sabbatical rest, known to him family, led to collisions with the end of deadlines, which is so significant for right-wing traffic. At that time only Sunday was protected (but today see § 193 BGB as amended from October 1, 1965). An expression of his support for assimilation was the change of his first name Samuel to Ernst in 1899. He was repeatedly elected to the board of directors of the Baden Lawyers' Association.

Free right movement

He was skeptical about the introduction of the BGB . This codification tied the jurisprudence, which led Fuchs to join the free right movement. The conception of his book “Schreibjustiz und Richterkönigtum” (1907) is based - as with Eugen Ehrlich (1862–1922) and Hermann Kantorowicz (1877–1940) - on the realization that the legal system is incomplete. The gap filling can neither be achieved by analogy or the reverse, but by a “sociological method”, whereby judges also have to base the decision on the respective custom. Ernst Fuchs tried to overcome traditional legal positivism (1925): “The system-logical jurisprudence has the only effect of suppressing good law on average for about a decade. The natural search for law by the RWG, on the other hand, leads to immediate victory, thus saving a lot of misery, struggles and costs. Insofar as today's jurisprudence does not remain purely system-logical, it is mostly the art of deriving what, according to the judge's secret opinion, is cheap and practical, from norms, as if it were ordered directly and not only indirectly through § 242 BGB ... The focus of legal research and legal teaching in the narrow sense must not be further the question: what is written? But what is fair and reasonable? Right from the start it must be hammered into the soul of the legal disciple that what is just and understanding, with rare exceptions, is what is meant and wanted by the law; that the first thing to do is to find that. In this way, legal science takes the second place it deserves alongside the old system dialectics. ”His much-noticed implementation proposal in 1912 was the demand for a“ legal clinic ”at universities in which inductive-real observation is taught instead of conceptually archived derivation. Legal advice seekers are treated both as a lecture subject and free of charge. “If it is the judge's first and most noble task to meet the needs of life and traffic and to be guided by the experiences of life, as the RG 100, 123 says beautifully and aptly, then it is also the first and most noble The duty of a true jurisprudence to research these traffic needs and to teach their disciples this research. ”(“ Die Justiz ”, Vol. 1 (1925/26), 22 ff.) Fuchs gave a concise summary of his theses in his last work“ Was wants the free law school? ”(1929) submitted. Here he found that the Reichsgericht, in its rulings on revaluation in 1924 (cf. “Mark is Mark”), “approached the legal standpoint and developed the law in a judicial manner” (Judicial legal training is now normatively anchored in Section 132 (4) of the GVG). The revaluation jurisprudence was not without controversy, because the core issue is the extent to which judges are bound by the law. In writing, he dealt with the increasing instrumentalization of the doctrine of free law. Before 1914, free law teachers were assigned to the liberal spectrum. The instrumentalisation shows the constitutional law teachers' conference in Münster in 1926, in which Erich Kaufmann - formerly a strict constitutional positivist - advocated a new legal conception shaped by natural law: “The legislator is not the creator of law. ... the state does not create law, the state creates laws; and state and law are subject to law. ”In 1927 Fritz Marschall von Bieberstein gave a lecture that was widely discussed in the literature:“ From the fight of law against the law ”, Stuttgart 1927. Ernst Fuchs had a positive relationship with the democratic legislator, what his activity in the republic-loyal journal " Die Justiz ", a monthly for the renewal of German legal life, showed. From 1925 Fuchs was the main employee there. In his last pamphlet “What does the Free Law School want?” He writes the lawyers in the studbook (1929) “Factual sense and mother joke” are necessary and added: “Otherwise, no one can cure the injustice perpetrated in good faith by legal craftsmen. “For the course he calls for dealing with the“ much more attractive, captivating questions of fact and evidence, which are at the same time much more difficult and important ”. Ernst Fuchs died on April 10, 1929 in Karlsruhe.

family

His son and lawyer, Albrecht Fuchs (1893–1972), emigrated to Australia in 1939 under the Nazis. There he took the name Albert S. Foulkes. He published the complete works of Fuchs' "Collected Writings on Free Law Doctrine and Legal Reform". His daughter Edith Fuchs (1897–1942) was murdered in Auschwitz.

Honors

One month before his death, he received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater Heidelberg.

Fonts

• Justice science. Selected writings on free law doctrine (edited by Albert S. Foulkes and Arthur Kaufmann ), C. F. Müller, Karlsruhe 1965.
• Collected writings on free law and legal reform (edited by Albert S. Foulkes), three volumes, Scientia Verlag, Aalen:
  • Vol. 1, Writing Justice and the Magisterium: The Harmfulness of Constructive Jurisprudence as well as four smaller treatises (1970), ISBN 978-3-511-03881-6 .
  • Vol. 2, Juristischer Kulturkampf and 15 smaller essays (1973), ISBN 978-3-511-03882-3 .
  • Vol. 3, 20 smaller essays, reviews, honors and obituaries, letters, index of persons for all 3 volumes (1975), ISBN 978-3-511-03883-0 .

literature

• Ernst Sontag : "Ernst Fuchs' Influence on German Jurisprudence", Leipzig Journal for German Law, Volume XXIII (1929), Col. 689.

Web links

• Dr. Detlev Fischer, Karlsruher Rechtshistorische Blätter, website of the Karlsruhe Museum of Legal History.