Otto Friedrich von Gierke, born Otto Friedrich Gierke (11 January 1841 – 10 October 1921) was a German legal scholar and historian. He is considered today as one of the most influential and important legal scholars of the 19th and 20th century. In his four-volume magnum opus entitled Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht (German Law of Associations), he pioneered the study of social groups and the importance of associations in German life, which stood between the divide of private and public law. During his career at Berlin University's law department, Gierke was a leading critic of the first draft of a new Civil Code for Imperial Germany. Gierke argued that it had been molded in an individualistic frame that was inconsistent with German social traditions. Gierke became known as a vocal Germanist within the German Historical School of Jurisprudence. The draft was revised to remove Roman law influences and the German Civil Code came into effect in 1900. Career In 1841 Otto Friedrich Gierke was born in Stettin (Szczecin), Pomerania, as the son of a Prussian civil servant. He was ennobled with a hereditary title on his 70th birthday in 1911, becoming Otto von Gierke at the climax of his long academic career. The young Gierke studied at universities in Heidelberg and Berlin. In Berlin he was taught by Georg Beseler, a jurist and member of the Prussian House of Lords. Beseler was a renown expert on German law and Gierke received his doctorate for a thesis on the obligations arising from medieval fiefdom (Lebensschulden). After serving in the 1866 Austro-Prussian War as a lieutenant, Gierke returned to Berlin to pursue an academic career. In 1868 he published his professorial dissertation on the legal history of the German cooperative (Rechtsgeschichte der deutschen Genossenschaft). Gierke argued that the cooperative was at the center of German communal order since ancient times and that the Germanic sense of justice set Germanic law apart from Roman law. Gierke worked as a private lecturer in Berlin and was appointed adjunct professor in 1871 after having served in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. Gierke went on to have a distinguished academic career. In 1872 the German University of Breslau appointed him as regular professor. While serving as acting rector, Gierke became prominent in academic circles for his research on Johannes Althusius. In his publications, Gierke asserted that Althusius' theory of the state as a social organism based on associations