social law, contemporary legal history, and the history of public law law. There were exceptions, of course – Germanists who also devoted themselves to criminal law(Carl Mittermaier)or to public law (Carl Friedrich von Gerber) – but on the whole, the Germanists’ legal history became a ‘private history of the law’ too, often supplemented by constitutional history. Criminal lawyers adopted natural law from the eighteenth century and now called it the philosophy of law (Paul Johann Anselm von Feuerbach). The tradition of natural law was also connected to international law (Franz von Liszt). The history of criminal law became increasingly less popular, especially at the peak of legal positivism; international law slowly migrated to public law. Since the mid nineteenth century – after the end of the Metternich era in 1848 – representatives of public law have developed their own goals. They separated the old ‘state sciences’ from one another and left political economy, financial science, and administrative doctrines aside to concentrate on the dogmatics of state law (Carl Friedrich von Gerber, Paul Laband) and administrative law (Otto Mayer). Only a few stayed with constitutional history. The history of the administrations became the preserve of historians (Gustav Schmoller, Otto Hintze, Fritz Hartung) – there was no history of administrative law. The situation outlined here remained almost unchanged until 1970. All chairs of legal history were (and still are) associated with private law. Their concern has primarily been the history of private law, although there were exceptions – Dietmar Willoweit for example. Public law saw the emergence of a tradition of constitutional history (Ernst Forsthoff, Ernst Rudolf Huber, Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, Rainer Wahl, and others), especially since the curriculum of 1935, which also had the propaedeutic character of introducing existing constitutional law. The intellectual history of public law remained largely untouched after Otto von Gierke’s book on Althusius of 1888 and the completion of Stintzing and Landsberg’s multivolume work in 1910. There were brief forays into constitutional history, but there was no real counterpart to Wieacker’s A History of Private Lawin its second edition in 1967. The impulses for this came from outside, from the political 163
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