Freund, Ernst b. January 30, 1864; New York, New York d. October 20, 1932; Chicago, Illinois
German American jurist.
Ernst Freund was born in New York City when his parents, Ludwig A. Freund and Nannie Bayer, were visiting the United States. He grew up in Germany, but upon completion of university studies in 1884, returned to the country of his birth.
Freund was one of the pioneers in the field of administrative law in the United States and a founder of the University of Chicago Law School. Freund brought a perspective that was influenced by German law and legal education.From 1875 to 1881 Freund attended gymnasium (high school) in Dresden and Frankfurt am Main. He then studied law, principally at the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg, which awarded him a doctorate of civil and canon law (JUD) in 1884. He also spent two semesters at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, where he attended lectures of comparative public law scholar Rudolf von Gneist. After his law studies in Germany, Freund went to New York City. There he attended Columbia University from 1884 to 1885 and studied public law in the department of Frank Goodnow and John W. Burgess. From 1886 to 1894 he practiced law in New York City. In 1892 and 1893 he also taught public law at Columbia University while doing graduate work that led to a PhD in public law in 1897. In 1894 he went to Chicago to join the faculty of political science at the University of Chicago. He remained at that university until his death.
Freund is remembered principally as one of the two pioneers—along with Goodnow—of the field of administrative law and also for his role in legal education. When Freund returned to New York in 1884, administrative law as a field of study was unknown in the United States and was in its most nascent of stages in Germany. Freund and Goodnow made administrative law a field of law separate from constitutional law. Freund’s vision of administrative law was based on a system of statute laws.
It thus had to overcome not only the common law’s suspicion of administrative law but also the common law’s focus on process and case law development.In 1902 when the University of Chicago created its law school, Freund was the university president’s principal adviser in the project. Harvard Law School was helping establish the school, but its dean, John Barr Ames, and the professor it was to loan to be the new dean at the University of Chicago, Joseph H. Beale, insisted on doing so exclusively in the Harvard way. That meant the teaching of law pure and simple and strictly by the study of cases. Freund and the University of Chicago president wanted something different: legal studies as an instrument of liberal education that included subjects Harvard regarded as political science and that allowed for systematic and comparative jurisprudence. Ames felt that Freund’s belief in the general methods of the German universities predisposed him against Harvard’s methods. Although the University of Chicago Law School went ahead largely on Harvard’s terms, German legal education through Freund had a “significant impact on the definition of American legal education” (Ellsworth 1977, 92). Today Freund’s ideas about legal education find considerably more resonance than they did a century ago.
In his ideas about both administrative law and legal education, Freund juxtaposed in one person the conflicting methods of the American common law and German legal science. He wrote as an American, but with a German’s perspective (Lepsius 1997, 8). From his earliest days in professional life, he extolled to Americans the virtues of systematic legislation such as was found in Germany (see, e.g., “The Proposed German Civil Code.” American Law Review 24 (1890): 237-254.
James R. Maxeiner
See also Burgess, John William
References and Further Reading
Ellsworth, Frank L. Law on the Midway: The Founding of the University of Chicago Law School. Chicago: Law School of the University of Chicago, 1977.
“Ernst Freund—Pioneer of Administrative
Law.” University of Chicago Law Review 29, 755 (1962).
Kraines, Oscar. The World and Ideas of Ernst Freund: The Search for General Principles of Legislation and Administrative Law. University: University of Alabama Press, 1974.
Lepsius, Oliver. Verwaltungsrecht unter dem Common Law: Amerikansiche Entwicklungen biszum New Deal. Tubingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1997.
Reitz, John C. “The Influence of Ernst Freund on American Law.” In Der Einfluβ deutscher Emigranten auf die Rechtsentwicklung in den USA und Deutschland. Eds. Marcus Lutter, Ernst C. Stiefel, and Michael H. Hoeflich. Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993, 423-435.