Legal views of E.R. Bierling

There has been little discussion about the legal views of the leading classical German legal positivist E.R. Bierling associated with the original psychological theory of law. His legal views had a significant impact on his contemporaries and the development of other psychology-based legal theories and concepts and the so-called structural theories of law. The study investigates E.R. Bierling’s concept of law and its main characteristics such as legal standard and mutual (social, but not individual) recognition of law. Distinguishing the direct recognition of law from the indirect one, E.R. Bierling was inconsistent with the psychological reasoning of the concept of law as he introduced the logically necessary element in law instead of the ethically due element criticized by him.