Ernst Freund Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Ernst Freund (1864–1932) was one of the leading American legal thinkers at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century. He was a practicing attorney, law professor, political scientist, writer, and social reformer. Freund was educated at the German universities of Berlin and Heidelberg and became a professor of administrative law and municipal corporations in 1892 at Columbia University in the United States. He received a PhD in political science while he was at Columbia, and in 1894 he accepted a position with the political science department at the University of Chicago in Illinois. In 1903 he joined the faculty of the new law school on the Chicago campus and was instrumental in developing and advancing its curriculum on social and public service, political science, and the law. Freund also helped establish the first graduate school of social service in the country. In 1915 he served as the president of the American Political Science Association.

Freund’s most famous work was his highly influential 1904 Police Power: Public Policy and Constitutional Rights. This book constitutes the first methodical analysis and structured elucidation of governmental police power in the American context, and it had a profound impact on the way the country’s legal and judicial systems considered the topic. At the heart of Freund’s dissection of police power was an engagement of the question of the extent of the limitations placed on legislative power by the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Freund called for a structure of legal rules and regulations that would properly balance rights of the individual versus rights of businesses and property rights. He clarified what police power entailed—the authority of the government to advance the general, public welfare by regulating the use of property—and when and where such an exercise of authority is legitimate, such as in the securing of public health and safety, public morals, public order, and security. He saw police power as not frozen in time with a particular understanding but instead as a much more elastic and malleable concept susceptible to adaptations over time in accord with varying social, economic, and political circumstances and conditions. This book and other writings helped cement Freund’s reputation as one of the foremost analysts and theorists of administrative law.

In 1928 Freund published another seminal work, Administrative Powers over Persons and Property. In this book, he articulates his concern over too great a growth and expansion of government power and calls for an appropriate reconciling and balancing of inherent respect for individual rights, social obligations and societal responsibilities of property, and the dominating demands of the public interest and common welfare. He importantly delineates here the differences and implications of power, authority, and leverage in society among governmental actors, individual citizens, and property. At the forefront of Freund’s arguments is an unyielding need to marry the law, legislative enactments, and legal interpretations with actual social reality. That is to say, Freund saw a compelling necessity for the law to remain sensitive and responsive to genuine needs of actual persons, not to be caught in an impersonal vacuum of pure jurisprudential theorizing. Freund was also a staunch defender of and strong advocate for free speech rights in both his scholarly writings and personal life. It was his essential belief that unfettered, open dialogue, debate, and discussion comprise a critical foundation of U.S. politics and society, and the American polity could only suffer if such speech rights were diminished and the range of discourse improperly narrowed.

Bibliography:

Freund, Ernst. Administrative Powers over Persons and Property: A Comparative Survey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928.
Empire and Sovereignty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1903.
The Police Power: Public Policy and Constitutional Rights. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1904.
Standards of American Legislation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965.

Kraines, Oscar. The World and Ideas of Ernst Freund: The Search for General Principles of Legislation and Administrative Law. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1974.