Léon Duguit (1859–1928) was a leading French
scholar
A scholar is a person who is a researcher or has expertise in an academic discipline. A scholar can also be an academic, who works as a professor, teacher, or researcher at a university. An academic usually holds an advanced degree or a termina ...
of
public law
Public law is the part of law that governs relations and affairs between legal persons and a government, between different institutions within a state, between different branches of governments, as well as relationships between persons that ...
(''droit public''). After a stint at
Caen
Caen (; ; ) is a Communes of France, commune inland from the northwestern coast of France. It is the Prefectures in France, prefecture of the Departments of France, department of Calvados (department), Calvados. The city proper has 105,512 inha ...
from 1882 to 1886, he was appointed to a chair of
constitutional law
Constitutional law is a body of law which defines the role, powers, and structure of different entities within a state, namely, the executive, the parliament or legislature, and the judiciary; as well as the basic rights of citizens and, in ...
at the
University of Bordeaux
The University of Bordeaux (, ) is a public research university based in Nouvelle-Aquitaine in southwestern France.
It has several campuses in the cities and towns of Bordeaux, Dax, Gradignan, Périgueux, Pessac, and Talence. There are al ...
in 1892, where one of his colleagues was
Émile Durkheim
David Émile Durkheim (; or ; 15 April 1858 – 15 November 1917) was a French Sociology, sociologist. Durkheim formally established the academic discipline of sociology and is commonly cited as one of the principal architects of modern soci ...
.
Duguit's novel
objectivist theory of public law, developed in amicable rivalry with his colleague
Maurice Hauriou of Toulouse, was to have a lasting effect on the development of these parts of law. In Duguit's opinion, the
state
State most commonly refers to:
* State (polity), a centralized political organization that regulates law and society within a territory
**Sovereign state, a sovereign polity in international law, commonly referred to as a country
**Nation state, a ...
was not a mythical
Sovereign
''Sovereign'' is a title that can be applied to the highest leader in various categories. The word is borrowed from Old French , which is ultimately derived from the Latin">-4; we might wonder whether there's a point at which it's appropriate to ...
inherently superior to all its subjects, or even a particularly powerful
legal person
In law, a legal person is any person or legal entity that can do the things a human person is usually able to do in law – such as enter into contracts, lawsuit, sue and be sued, ownership, own property, and so on. The reason for the term "''le ...
, but merely a group of people engaged in
public service
A public service or service of general (economic) interest is any service intended to address the needs of aggregate members of a community, whether provided directly by a public sector agency, via public financing available to private busin ...
, the activity constituting and legitimising the state. Although critical of notions such as
sovereignty
Sovereignty can generally be defined as supreme authority. Sovereignty entails hierarchy within a state as well as external autonomy for states. In any state, sovereignty is assigned to the person, body or institution that has the ultimate au ...
, democracy, legal personhood and even
property
Property is a system of rights that gives people legal control of valuable things, and also refers to the valuable things themselves. Depending on the nature of the property, an owner of property may have the right to consume, alter, share, re ...
to the extent it is not legitimised by a social purpose, he distinguished himself from
Marxists
Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical and materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflict, and ...
by emphasizing the function of the economy for the development of the state.
Works
* ''L'État, le droit objectif et la loi positive''. Extracted as "Theory of Objective Law Anterior to the State" in ''Modern French Legal Philosophy'', trans. Mrs Franklin W. Scott and Joseph P. Chamberlain (New York, Kelly, 1916; South Hackensack NJ, Rothman, 1968), pp. 235–344
* ''L'État les gouvernants et les agents''
*
Souveraineté et liberté'
* ''Les transformations du droit public''
* ''Traité de droit constitutionnel''
*
*
[The text translated is not identified.]
* Translated by Margaret Grandgent and Ralph W. Gifford.
References
*
*
;Notes
1859 births
1928 deaths
People from Libourne
University of Bordeaux alumni
Academic staff of the University of Bordeaux
French international relations scholars
French jurists
{{France-law-bio-stub