CONFRONTING THE DARK LEGAL HISTORY: BERND RÜTHERS – THE CONSCIOUS OF THE GERMAN LEGAL THEORY

Abstract

The German legal theory is of crucial importance for understanding the continental legal tradition to which most of the continent’s legal systems belong. The continental legal tradition reaches far beyond Europe influencing the development of legal systems of countries on other continents. Having in mind the reach history of the German legal theory in reviving and rethinking the old Roman law that lies in the foundations of the contemporary continental legal tradition, researching it is a very important task for all lawyers, theorists and practitioners that work in legal systems belonging to the continental legal tradition. However, the German legal theory beside its bright side has also a very dark past during the rule of the national-socialist terror regime in Germany from 1933 till 1945. The terror regime was underpinned by legal perversion to which creation, unfortunately, many leading legal theorists contributed. After the end of the Second World War, as in many other areas of living, also in the legal science ruled a “vow of silence”. During the sixties od the 20th century this “vow of silence” was interrupted by an ambitious and brave young lawyer Bernd Rüthers who revealed the intellectual crimes of the leading German legal theorists during that period in his habilitation thesis. The focus of this paper is on the intellectual work of Bernd Rüthers in researching the dark side of the German legal theory and the influence his research had on initiating a broader debate of this issue among German lawyers, but also historians during the eighties of the 20th century. That debate helped the process of “dealing with the past” in the German society that was necessary not only to understand the dark past, but also not to let the dark past repeat in the future.