Eugen Ehrlich

Life and ideas

Eugen Ehrlich was born in Czernowitz, in the far east of the Austro-Hungarian empire, a city where Germans, Romanians, Ukrainians, Jews and others lived side by side under the state's law, each with their own customs. As a professor there, he saw that the way people actually arranged their marriages, contracts and inheritance often had little to do with the official code. In Fundamental Principles of the Sociology of Law (1913) he wrote that the centre of legal development lies in society itself, and he distinguished the 'living law' of social associations from the rules for decision applied by the courts and the norms of the state. He urged lawyers to study the living law by observing and recording it. His work founded the sociology of law and anticipated modern legal pluralism. He died in Vienna in 1922, after the war had cost him his post when the city changed hands.