Paul Laband


Paul Laband was a German jurist and the German Empire's leading scholar of constitutional law.

Life and work

Laband was born into a Jewish family and converted to Christianity in 1857. He studied law at Breslau, Heidelberg and Berlin, and obtained his habilitation in Heidelberg in 1861. He was called to teach at Königsberg in 1864, and at Strasbourg in 1871, where he taught until his retirement. The Imperial government appointed him as councillor of state of Alsace-Lorraine in 1879 and as a member of that state's legislature in 1911. He was a signatory of the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three that supported Germany's entry into World War I.
Laband's writings on constitutional law are characterized by a formalist approach focused on terminology and logic, disregarding other rules of statutory interpretation such as historical, philosophical, political or teleological considerations. In a 1870 paper on Prussian budget law, he established the distinction made in German legal scholarship between laws in the formal sense and laws in the material sense. Laband was also influential as the editor of several leading law reviews and as the author of the textbook Staatsrecht des deutschen Reiches, which appeared in five editions until 1914.

Works