Menger, Anton (1841–1906)

Anton Menger, born in Maniow, Poland, became professor of civil procedural law at the University of Vienna in 1878. Anton, brother of the economist Carl Menger (1840–1921), was the founder and leading author of a current of legal thinking that was very widespread in European civil law countries at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) put the critical epithet legal socialism on this school of thought.

Legal socialism used various approaches to argue the possibility by reforming the law of establishing a legal order inspired by criteria of social justice. Menger maintained a conception of law as a system of norms, emanating from a sovereign power, for the purpose of maintaining or transforming society. He expressed confidence in ...