… but Life gives Spirit?

This book is a comparative study of the development of constitutional legal thought in Germany and the Unit-ed States at the beginning of the twentieth century. During this period, “life” was a common trope in the legal language of the time. Many legal scholars argued that “law” was disconnected from “life” – and they proposed various strategies to reconnect the two spheres.
These developments are set against the backdrop of the enormous political, social and cultural changes that took place around 1900. In Germany, the focus is on the methodological debates of the Weimar period. In the United States, the focus is on the emergence of social jurisprudence and legal realism.

Marius Mikkel Kjølstad is a lecturer in legal history at the University of Oslo. He wrote his doctoral thesis on Norwegian state theory in the 19th century.