Inama-Sternegg examines the state’s legal relationship to territory by distinguishing territorial sovereignty, administrative intervention in landed property, and private ownership of state domains. His argument connects legal categories to political purposes: public rights require justification through the state’s functions and historical circumstances, not deduction from inherited titles.
Das öffentliche Recht muss in erster Linie wahr, es muss der richtige Ausdruck des realen Verhältnisses sein, welches geregelt wird.
English translation: Public law must in the first place be true; it must be the correct expression of the real relation which is being regulated.
This requirement makes political inquiry indispensable to jurisprudence. It identifies which rights the state needs and which contradict its purposes. Enduring purposes ground public law, while temporary expediency remains subordinate to them; those enduring purposes nevertheless develop with social life. Inama-Sternegg distinguishes general purposes, expressed in constitutional rights, from particular purposes authorizing administrative powers.
His account of territorial sovereignty begins with the personality of the state, understood as the legally organized people rather than a ruler standing over subjects as external objects of command.
Es ist unmöglich, das staatliche Willensrecht ohne Anknüpfung an die staatliche Persönlichkeit zu entwickeln.
English translation: It is impossible to develop the law of the state's will (Willensrecht) without connecting it to the personality of the state.
Territory forms part of the state’s physical existence, rather than property belonging to a separate sovereign owner. Territorial right consequently belongs to the sphere of personality, not ownership or a specially public right over things. Externally, it demands recognition of the state’s spatial existence; internally, it entails duties of preservation.
This organic conception does not make existing borders immutable. Indivisibility prohibits destruction of the state’s organic unity, not every territorial cession. The people persists across generations, but continuity includes transformation: populations may diverge, and previously foreign groups may become assimilated. Law must therefore permit peaceful territorial adjustment instead of leaving revolution and war as the only instruments of change.
Am entschiedensten endlich ist die dauernde Zweckbestimmung für das Staatsleben in dem Staatsgebietsrechte zu erkennen, welches daher auch als die nothwendige Voraussetzung aller übrigen Rechte des Staates in Bezug auf das Staatsgebiet erscheint.
English translation: Most decidedly of all, finally, the permanent determination of purpose for the life of the state is to be discerned in the law of the state territory, which therefore also appears as the necessary presupposition of all the remaining rights of the state with respect to its territory.
The distinction between prerequisite and substantive justification organizes the subsequent analysis. Territorial sovereignty supplies the spatial condition for governmental powers without independently establishing their purposes or scope. Internally, it excludes privileged exemptions from public authority. Internationally, reciprocal recognition and common purposes justify qualifications of territorial exclusiveness. Inama-Sternegg considers extraterritoriality, extradition, asylum, foreigners’ rights, and interstate servitudes in this light. Diplomatic immunity should extend only as far as official functions require; the extensive foreign jurisdiction established by the Ottoman capitulations, by contrast, violates sovereign independence and equality.
Administrative interference with landownership likewise requires more than an appeal to sovereignty. Expropriation is possible because land constitutes the state’s indispensable territorial basis, but each exercise requires a particular public purpose recognized by law. Ordinary expropriation concerns land and rights in land, whereas emergency requisitions of movable goods rest on different grounds. The state may claim property required for its purpose without absorbing its economic value: compensation follows from that distinction. Where a servitude suffices, outright acquisition exceeds the justified intervention.
The same reasoning challenges mining regalia that deprive owners of mineral value without compensation. Restrictions on economic activity instead derive from protective governmental powers. Discussions of land-charge redemption, communal partition, and secularization connect economic freedom with exclusive public authority. Secularization requires a legally established threat to effective state action; territorial sovereignty alone does not authorize acquisition of corporate property.
The concluding treatment separates fiscal domains from sovereignty and administrative rights. Although domains often arose from a historical confusion of lordship, ownership, and sovereignty, their established private-law status can survive rejection of those doctrines. Their revenues serve public purposes, but this does not transform them into inalienable territory. Retention or sale is therefore a political-economic question. Inama-Sternegg cautiously favors movement from proprietary toward administrative relations. The work detaches sovereignty from ownership while giving public intervention in land both a purposive foundation and determinate limits.
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