RphZ Rechtsphilosophie

Pitamic’s contribution to the understanding of law ranges between the methodological purity of legal science and an integral conception of law. The methodological purity demands that one avoids mixing different thinking methods. At the same time,...

Achenwall’s textbook on ‘ius naturae’, first published in 1750 and subsequently often reprinted, was certainly one of the most powerful lecture-compendia in the second half of the 18th century in Germany, not at least because of its momentous...

Abstract The Elementa Iuris Naturae of G. Achenwall have been one of the most common and most successful textbooks of natural law at German universities in the 18th century, not­withstanding its lack of originality concerning the foundation of...

This article serves as an introduction to this special issue on Gottfried Achenwall (1719-1772). Section I briefly sketches Achenwall’s intellectual biography, outlines the disciplines he taught at Göttingen and closes by highlighting the...

In § 116 of Achenwall/Pütter Elementa Iuris Naturae the following possibilities of conflicts of duties are listed: “There can be a conflict 1. of prohibiting laws with each other, 2. of prescribing laws with each other, 3. of prescribing laws...

In the first edition of his textbook on Natural Law (1750), Achenwall advocates a theory of obligation which reveals that he was a Wolffian before he came from Halle via Marburg to Göttingen in 1748: Obligation is essentially the connection of a...

Kant famously distinguished between an internal and an external relationship between humans and he limited law to the external relationship. However, this distinc­tion and limitation was not invented by Kant but the outcome of a long development of...

The doctrine of imputation is at the centre of Gottfried Achenwall’s theory of natural law. Together with obligation (obligatio), imputation (imputatio) is, according to Ach­enwall, one of the two basic forces of a law. In contrast to Samuel von...

This article is an ethical evaluation of a draft law regulating the legal responsibility of companies for the observance of human rights and environmental standards along their supply chains. The draft law recognizes ethical responsibility in supply...

This article asks whether public international law is facing an epochal change. The first section spots various current trends in international law that suggest a decreasing significance of international law and institutions in today’s...

In the early 1800s, K.C.F. Krause penned a legal philosophy of an unreservedly cosmopolitan bent. In bold strokes, Krause transcended the methodological nationalism of the philosophy of his era, drafting constitutional designs for supranational...

Article 53 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties famously introduced a special class of international legal rules - jus cogens norms - without specifying its content. The paper proceeds by adopting the heuristic framework of...

The article traces the problem of extraterritorial obligations in the early history of ideas, spanning from Thucydides to Grotius. Extraterritorial obligations are defined here as moral obligations of a legitimate authority to perform or not to...

This work aims to clarify how the relationship between politics and law is conceived in Johannes Althusius’ greatest work, Politica methodice digesta. The intention is thus to explain what function the law, specifically defined jus symbioticum -...

The task of the philosophy of international law is to develop new models for an institutional arrangement that distributes resources and life opportunities fairly throughout the world. In doing so, it is possible to tie in with diverse traditional...