HE DIDN'T JUST WANT TO BE PART OF A YOUTH MOVEMENT. AN INTERPRETATION OF HERMANN KANTOROWICZ’S FREE LAW.

Abstract

For Hermann Kantorowicz (1877-1940), legal philosophy was a natural part of his impressively broad academic legal education. Yet his work on legal philosophy is fragmentary and needs reconstruction. Doing this, Kantorowicz’s “classic” concept of free law appears in a new light. He has always had difficulties in stating exactly what the free law actually is. In Kantorowicz’s late work, the concept of dogmas takes on the position that occupied free law in the early works. Dogmas and free law are functionally equivalent. The law is not simply the commands, i.e., authoritative orders, or norms, that is, statements that are perceived as mandatory. The law is above all dogma, that is, it is a body of meaningful entities processing via a specific logic of coherent accommodation. The concept of dogma therefore overcomes the traditional opposition of recognizing and inventing the law. Kantorowicz emphasizes how legal science, and the courts as well, are in a certain sense part of the law, solely by arguing reasonably in the legal mode.