EHRLICH, EUGEN

born Sept. 14, 1862, Czernowitz, Austrian Empire [now Chernovtsy, Ukraine] died May 2, 1922, Vienna, Austria Austrian legal scholar and teacher generally credited with founding the discipline of the sociology of law. Educated in law at the University of Vienna, Ehrlich taught there for several years and then (18991914) served as associate professor of Roman law at the University of Czernowitz. As a young man he was converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism, but late in life he devoted much attention to Jewish problems. Anti-Semitism prevented him from teaching after World War I. Ehrlich's sociology of law was based in part on the free-law, or sense-of-justice, conception formulated in Germany by Hermann Kantorowicz. He recognized two complementary sources: first, legal history and jurisprudence ( i.e., precedents that seem useful and their written explications); and, second, living law as shown in current social custom. Because the second component was more novel, readers of Ehrlich tended to overlook the first, and some believed mistakenly that he had dismissed formal law entirely. His major work was Grundlegung der Soziologie des Rechts (1913; Fundamental Principles of the Sociology of Law).