Gans, Eduard (1797–1839)

Gans was an influential legal theorist and an admirer of Hegel’s doctrines regarding the nature and purposes of political institutions. He attempted to extend the role of those doctrines to the practical reform of German legal theory. Gans criticized this theory as being neither universal nor in accord with natural human rights. One of the most evident expressions of this partiality of the law was to be found in the legal disregard of the natural civil rights of Jewish citizens. Gans looked to the past, to Roman law, with its universal applications and its firm structures based upon natural rights, as a model upon which a future German legal system could be constructed.