Duguit, LÉOn (1859–1928)

Léon Duguit, born in Libourne (Gironde), France, was a jurist and legal and political theorist. One of the most revolutionary and influential thinkers of his generation, he studied law at the University of Bordeaux and taught at the University of Caen from 1883 until he returned to the University of Bordeaux in 1886 to teach there. He became dean of the law faculty at Bordeaux and taught there for the rest of his career.

While at Bordeaux, Duguit developed an allegiance to his colleague Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), a pioneer sociologist, who may have influenced the formation of Duguit's “objectivist theory” and “law of solidarity.” Duguit contended that social solidarity occurs when people have common needs that can be satisfied jointly or when people have different needs and abilities that can be satisfied through exchange of mutual services.

By challenging the validity of the jurisprudential doctrine of his time, Duguit established himself as an original interpreter of constitutional rights. He asserted that law arises out of social relationships rather than from a single source of authority such as the state or sovereign, fundamental dogma in France and elsewhere at that time. He emphasized that theories that promote the law as a creation of the state were outdated and misguided. Rather, he stressed that the state existed as a social need, an institution created to support and facilitate people's social interdependence or solidarity.

With this premise as the foundation, Duguit maintained that law should not emanate from the state or the sovereign, but should arise from the needs of people in a given society at a given time. With the state as primarily an instrument for furthering social life, the state and the sovereign were subject to the rule of law, not the reverse.

The most comprehensive explanation of these views is in Traité de Droit Constitutionnel (Treatise on Constitutional Law), originally written by Duguit in 1911 with five volumes but condensed in the third edition (1927) to three volumes. This work, which includes comparisons to foreign legislations, has become a classic reference concerning the interpretation of constitutional rights. Duguit never prescribed paths to consensus or resolution concerning disparate perceptions of social need. However, Traité contemplated the needed correction of dissonance that evolved when officials prioritized logical structures and political security at the expense of expressed social needs.

Duguit wrote widely on both public and private law and what today scholars consider political science. He wrote L'état, le droit objectif et la loi positive (The State, Objective Law, and Positive Law; 1901) in response to Georg Jellinek's (1851–1911) “System of Subjective Public Laws” (originally written in German in 1892). This was the first work in which Duguit clearly articulated his opposing theories to traditional juridical opinions and ideas. Duguit's only book translated into English was Law in the Modern State (1919), which included a comparison of French and German law.