10 Facts About Gustav Radbruch

Gustav Radbruch was a German legal scholar and politician.

Gustav Radbruch is regarded as one of the most influential legal philosophers of the 20th century.

Gustav Radbruch passed his first bar exam in Berlin in 1901, and the following year he received his doctorate with a dissertation on "The Theory of Adequate Causation".

Gustav Radbruch was a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, and held a seat in the Reichstag from 1920 to 1924.

In 1926, Gustav Radbruch accepted a renewed call to lecture at Heidelberg where he delivered his inaugural lecture entitled "Der Mensch im Recht " as the newly appointed Professor of Criminal Law on 13 November 1926.

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In September 1945, Gustav Radbruch published a short paper "Funf Minuten Rechtsphilosophie ", which was influential in shaping the jurisprudence of values, prevalent in the aftermath of World War II as a reaction against legal positivism.

Gustav Radbruch thereby had the idea of utility or usefulness spring forth from an analysis of the idea of justice.

Hotly disputed is the question whether Gustav Radbruch was a legal positivist before 1933 and executed an about-face in his thinking due to the advent of Nazism, or whether he continued to develop, under the impression of Nazi crimes, the relativistic values-teaching he had already been advocating before 1933.

Gustav Radbruch's theories are posited against the positivist "pure legal tenets" represented by Hans Kelsen and, to some extent, from Georg Jellinek.

In sum, Gustav Radbruch's formula argues that where statutory law is incompatible with the requirements of justice "to an intolerable degree", or where statutory law was obviously designed in a way that deliberately negates "the equality that is the core of all justice", statutory law must be disregarded by a judge in favour of the justice principle.