David Rabban, University of Texas at Austin School of Law, has published "Jhering’s Influence on American Legal Thought” in the collection, Jhering Global: Internationales Symposium Zum 200. Geburtstag Rudolf Von Jherings (1818-1892), which was the product of this conference. From Professor Rabban's introduction:
–Dan ErnstRudolph von Jhering has influenced American legal thought since the late nineteenth century, though the nature of his influence has varied over time. In this essay, I proceed chronologically. I begin with the late nineteenth-century American legal scholars who admired Jhering as part of the great tradition of German legal scholarship they viewed as a model for their own. Like American scholars in numerous disciplines during this period, many of them had studied as postgraduates in Germany. Jhering himself declared in an 1881 letter to his German colleague, Oskar von Bülow: “my writings are widely read even in the United States, and a review of my book, The Ends of Law, is the most brilliant which has ever appeared about any of my works.”1 I then address Jhering’s substantial influence on Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Roscoe Pound, two of the most important figures in the history of American legal thought. I focus on Holmes’s famous book, The Common Law, published in 1881, and Pound’s development of “sociological jurisprudence” in the decade before World War I. Jhering also influenced both adherents and critics of the “legal realism” that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, which many perceive as an extension of sociological jurisprudence. Scholars in the United States often applied to American law their understanding of Jhering’s position that the prevailing overemphasis on deductive logic and abstract legal theory should be replaced by a social theory of law consciously designed to promote the present public interest. They relied on Jhering as well in analyzing technical legal doctrine, as I point out in discussing classic articles on contract law by Lon Fuller in the 1930s and Friedrich Kessler in the 1960s. Kessler emigrated to the United States as a refugee from Nazi Germany in the 1930s after receiving his legal education in Germany.
