Ernst Rudolf Huber (8 June 1903 – 28 October 1990) was a German

jurist A jurist is a person with expert knowledge of law; someone who analyses and comments on law. This person is usually a specialist legal scholar, mostly (but not always) with a formal qualification in law and often a legal practitioner. In the Uni ...

, noted as a

constitutional historian Constitutional history is the area of historical study covering both written constitutions and uncodified constitutions, and became an academic discipline during the 19th century. ''The Oxford Companion to Law'' (1980) defined it as the study of t ...

and for his attempts to provide a legal underpinning for the

Nazi regime Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...

Life and work

Huber studied law in

Bonn The federal city of Bonn ( lat, Bonna) is a city on the banks of the Rhine in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, with a population of over 300,000. About south-southeast of Cologne, Bonn is in the southernmost part of the Rhine-Ruhr r ...

under

Carl Schmitt Carl Schmitt (; 11 July 1888 – 7 April 1985) was a German jurist, political theorist, and prominent member of the Nazi Party. Schmitt wrote extensively about the effective wielding of political power. A conservative theorist, he is noted as a ...

. He received a PhD in 1926 for a work on state church law, and his

habilitation Habilitation is the highest university degree, or the procedure by which it is achieved, in many European countries. The candidate fulfills a university's set criteria of excellence in research, teaching and further education, usually including a ...

in 1931 for a work on economic administrative law, which he was instrumental in establishing as a field of study. In 1933, he was called to teach in

Kiel Kiel () is the capital and most populous city in the northern Germany, German state of Schleswig-Holstein, with a population of 246,243 (2021). Kiel lies approximately north of Hamburg. Due to its geographic location in the southeast of the J ...

, and subsequently also taught law in

Leipzig Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as wel ...

after 1937 and in

Strasbourg Strasbourg (, , ; german: Straßburg ; gsw, label=Bas Rhin Alsatian, Strossburi , gsw, label=Haut Rhin Alsatian, Strossburig ) is the prefecture and largest city of the Grand Est region of eastern France and the official seat of the Eu ...

from 1941 to 1944. Like Georg Dahm and Karl Larenz, Huber (who joined the

Nazi Party The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party (german: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP), was a far-right politics, far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that crea ...

on 1 May 1933) belonged to the "Kiel school" of

constitutional law Constitutional law is a body of law which defines the role, powers, and structure of different entities within a State (polity), state, namely, the executive (government), executive, the parliament or legislature, and the judiciary; as well as th ...

, which attempted to legitimize the ''

Führerstaat This is a list of words, terms, concepts and slogans of Nazi Germany used in the historiography covering the Nazi regime. Some words were coined by Adolf Hitler and other Nazi Party members. Other words and concepts were borrowed and appropriated ...

'',

Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler (; 20 April 188930 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was dictator of Nazi Germany, Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his death in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the le ...

's dictatorship, by constructing a legal structure to anchor it in the German state as the source of all legitimate power. In doing so, Huber was influential in shaping the law of Nazi Germany and in recruiting others to that task. Because of this, he was excluded from the public law scholars' association in 1956, and did not find work as an ordinary professor until 1962, when he was appointed to a chair in

Göttingen Göttingen (, , ; nds, Chöttingen) is a college town, university city in Lower Saxony, central Germany, the Capital (political), capital of Göttingen (district), the eponymous district. The River Leine runs through it. At the end of 2019, t ...

. After the end of the 1930s, Huber's work focused on the history of German constitutional law. This culminated in his ''Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789'', which covered mainly Prussian constitutional law from 1789 to 1933, and was published in eight volumes between 1957 and 1990.

References

Ewald Grothe Ewald Grothe (born 23 February 1961 in Nieheim, Westphalia) is a German historian. Since 2009 he has been an extraordinary professor at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal and since 2011 he has been head of the Archive of Liberalism of the Fri ...

: ''Zwischen Geschichte und Recht. Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichtsschreibung 1900–1970'', Oldenbourg, München 2005 (= ''Ordnungssysteme,'' vol. 16), . Review from

Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde (; 19 September 1930 – 24 February 2019) was a German legal scholar and a justice on Germany's Federal Constitutional Court. He was a professor at the University of Freiburg and the author of more than 20 books and 8 ...

. In: ''

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung The ''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'' (; ''FAZ''; "''Frankfurt General Newspaper''") is a centre-right conservative-liberal and liberal-conservativeHans Magnus Enzensberger: Alter Wein in neuen Schläuchen' (in German). ''Deutschland Radio'', ...

'', January, 24, 2006. * Ewald Grothe (Hrsg.): ''

– Ernst Rudolf Huber. Briefwechsel 1926–1981. Mit ergänzenden Materialien'', Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2014, . * Ewald Grothe (Hrsg.): ''Ernst Rudolf Huber. Staat – Verfassung – Geschichte'', Nomos Verlag, Baden-Baden 2015 (= ''Staatsverständnisse'', vol. 80), . *

External links

* 1903 births 1990 deaths Jurists from Schleswig-Holstein Lawyers in the Nazi Party {{Germany-law-bio-stub