Otto von Gierke was born in Stettin, the son of a Prussian official.
He studied law at the University of Berlin and held professorships at the universities of Breslau (1872-84), Heidelberg (1884-87) and Berlin (1887 until his death). He is generally described as having formulated, on the basis of the writings of Jacob Grimm (1785-1863), a specific Germanist school of law, as opposed to the Romanists:
At the beginning of Gierke’s career, German legal scholarship was dominated by the Romanist school of Savigny; but Gierke began and remained a strong Germanist.
The Germanists, like the Romanists, were historically minded; their research, however, did not take them back to the Roman empire, Justinian’s code, and the reception of that code, but followed the path marked out by Jacob Grimm to the law of the ancient German Mark and the Gemeinde (local community) to feudal records, town charters, the rules of guilds in search of ‘truly German’ and legal principles. The first volume of Gierke’s Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht (18681913)... was the first product of his self-imposed task of broadening the foundation for a German theory of associations by a detailed study of successive types of organizations in German history. (Lewis, 1968)From an economic point of view, the emphasis should not be on the specific nationality of the German law. The emphasis of this empirical research is rather on the law as it has developed by itself, instead of the law as it has been imposed by church or state, both drawing on Roman law which is thereby transported through time without recognition of the immediate history and historically grown context where it is to be applied. The working hypothesis is that the law can be empirically found in the customs, charters, contracts and the like of identifiable associations of men, whether commercial, political, charitable, professional or other associations. In establishing contractual relationships one with the other, people actually create a new legal entity, such as a corporation. Here the view is distinct from the Roman tradition, which has to create the fiction of a legal identity being granted by the state through fiat. Hence the research is firmly embedded in identifiable economic practices: ‘Gierke’s concept of “social law” enables him to construe the internal rules of churches, trade unions, business corporations, etc., as independent of state determination and to put such bodies on an equal basis with human persons in claiming areas of freedom into which the state cannot intrude’ (ibid., p. 180).
This specific approach to legal research was similar enough to economic research into history of the time for it to be merged with the economic research to form a powerful critique of legislation.