Private Equity, Social Inequity: German Judges React to Inflation, 1914–24

• Published in: Central European history Vol. 16; no. 1; pp. 76 - 94
• Main Author: Hughes, Michael L.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, USA Cambridge University Press 01-03-1983; Emory University
• Subjects: Contracts; Creditors; Debt; Debtors; Good faith; Judges; Judicial system; Political parties; Privacy rights; Revaluation
• ISSN: 0008-9389; 1569-1616
• DOI: 10.1017/S000893890001089X

Responding to a lawyer's impassioned plea for “justice” for his client, a great judge supposedly remarked, “We deal with the law here, not with justice.” This apocryphal comment sums up a fundamental dilemma: should courts simply apply the law as written or seek out “justice” in every case? Before World War I, German jurists chose the former approach. For them the Rechtsstaat (variously, the just state or state rooted in law) was to be secured by establishing a legal code covering all contingencies and then applying this code exactly to each case. Only thus could individuals and their rights be protected from caprice or arbitrariness. Yet between 1914 and 1924 the German judiciary jettisoned this concept and tacitly redefined the Rechtsstaat to make the judges' conception of equity, rather than statutes, the ultimate guarantee of justice.