JHERING, RUDOLF VON (1818-1892), German jurist, was born on Aug. 22, 1818, at Aurich in East Friesland, where his father practised as a lawyer. He entered the University of Heidelberg in 1836, and visited successively Gottingen and Ber lin. He lectured at various universities, and in 1868 went to be professor of Roman law at Vienna, where he had an extraordinary success, and was given a title of nobility in 1872. In the same year he went back to Gottingen. He had already established a leading position among civilians with his Geist des romischen Rechts (1852-65), and from now till his death on Sept. 17, 1892, he was as predominant as Savigny had been in the first half of the century. Of his many works perhaps the best known are Der Kampf urn's Recht (1872) and Der Zweck im Recht, and the Jurisprudenz des tdglichen Lebens (Eng. trans. 1904). His great works, the Geist and Rechtsgeschichte, were left unfinished as works of that scope might well be.
Jhering's work is in a sense a development of the "historical" jurisprudence of Savigny, and yet contributed to the breakdown of the theory at the end of the century. The basis of Savigny's theory is a rigid individualism; the purpose of law in this theory is to allow the fullest measure of freedom to the individual will consistent with equal freedom for others. Jhering's view is a social utilitarianism and his view is definitely teleological. For him law does not flow peacefully and inevitably ; it is changed, deliberately and by conflict. "Whereas the philosophical jurist considered that the principles of justice and right are discovered a priori . . . and
the historical jurist taught that the principles of justice are found by experience. . . . Jhering held that means of serving human ends are discovered by experience and fashioned con sciously into laws" (Roscoe Pound in 24 Harvard Law Review). Of his theories of Roman law the most important are his discovery of the dualism (religious and political) in the Roman system, and his view that remedies are prior to rights, which are deductions from existing remedies. Pushing this process further back, Jhering came to the social interests promoted by the remedies, and thence directly to his main position.
Among others of his works, all of them characteristic of the author and sparkling with wit, may be mentioned the following: Beitrdge zur Lehre von Besitz, first published in the Jahrbacher far die Dogmatik des heutigen romischen and deutsc hen Privat rechts, and then separately; Der Besitzwille, and an article entitled "Besitz" in the Handworterbuch der Staatswissenschaften (1891), which aroused at the time much controversy, particularly on ac count of the opposition manifested to Savigny's conception of the subject; Scherz and Ernst in der Jurisprudenz ; Das Scliuldmoment im romischen Privat-recht (1867) ; Das Trznkgeld (1882); and among the papers he left behind him his V orge schichte der Indoeuropiier, a fragment which has been published by v. Ehrenberg (1894).
See M. de Jonge, Rudolf v. Jhering (i888) ; A. Merkel, Rudolf von Jhering (1893).