Julius Landesberger: Review of Georg Meyer’s Der Antheil der Reichsorgane an der Reichsgesetzgebung (1891)

Julius Landesberger’s 1891 review approves Meyer’s account of imperial legislation while challenging its conceptual foundations. Its central distinction separates the constitutional allocation of competences among state organs from the politically charged idea of a “bearer of state power.” Historically meaningful descriptions of sovereignty, Landesberger argues, do not necessarily furnish valid categories of positive law.

The opening places legislative theory within a transformation of German constitutional scholarship. Questions about legislation and participating organs increasingly occupy the attention once directed toward liberties and constitutional guarantees. Gneist’s celebrated formula introduces this change:

Aber in einem tieferen Sinne ist die Anführung des berühmten Gneist’schen Schlagwortes wohl geeignet, einen bedeutsamen Umschwung in der Problemstellung des deutschen Staatsrechtes zu illustrieren.

English translation: But in a deeper sense the citation of Gneist's famous catchword is well suited to illustrate a significant change in the way the problems of German constitutional law are posed.

Landesberger attributes persistent disagreements over the concept of law partly to unstable categories inherited from general jurisprudence. The narrower question of institutional participation offers greater prospects for doctrinal agreement. Meyer responds productively to Fricker’s criticism of prevailing explanations of the emperor’s duty to promulgate laws: where criticism exposed gaps, Meyer supplies constructive constitutional interpretation.

Die positiven Ergebnisse dieser Forschung bedeuten daher vielfach eine Ergänzung und Berichtigung, aber keine wesentliche Modification der herrschenden Lehre.

English translation: The positive results of this research therefore in many respects amount to a supplementation and correction, but to no essential modification, of the prevailing doctrine.

Meyer assigns legislative sanction to the Bundesrat while treating transmission of bills to the Reichstag, authentication, and promulgation as constitutional duties of the emperor. The Reichstag contributes positively to legislation rather than merely exercising a veto: its assent concerns the legislative command as well as its proposed content. By distinguishing the Bundesrat’s initial handling of a proposal from its sanction after parliamentary assent, Meyer reconciles Articles 5 and 7 of the imperial constitution. Landesberger praises this clarification but directs his extended criticism toward its theoretical premises.

Meyer concedes that the concept of an organ suffices for an abstract account of the state, yet preserves the “bearer of power” as a category established by particular constitutions. Landesberger presents this qualification as follows:

Aber nicht überall kann der Begriff „Träger der Gewalt“ entbehrt werden; denn er ist „durch die positiven Vorschriften bestimmter Verfassungen gegeben“.

English translation: But the concept of the "bearer of authority" cannot be dispensed with everywhere; for it is "given by the positive provisions of particular constitutions."

This construction identifies the people in representative democracy and the monarch in constitutional monarchy as specially situated bearers of authority. Landesberger objects that this figure must be distinguished both from the organ exercising power and from the legal subject to whom power belongs. If the bearer possesses authority in its own right, however, the latter distinction collapses: the monarch or people displaces the state as the legal subject of state power.

His alternative separates political significance from legal attribution. Popular sovereignty may illuminate American constitutional history without establishing a legal subject alongside the state and its organs. A people acting constitutionally performs an organ’s function; understood as an organized political unity, it is the state itself. The mere aggregate of governed individuals cannot independently express a legally unified will.

Landesberger applies the same analysis to German monarchy. Article 57 of the Vienna Final Act expresses Restoration-era princely sovereignty, which cannot simply be equated with the unity of state power. Several organs may jointly exercise supreme authority without fragmenting the state’s legal personality. The historical origins of constitutional government therefore do not settle its legal structure.

The objection becomes concrete in Meyer’s comparison of Prussia and Belgium. Meyer derives a presumption of monarchical competence from the absence of an express restriction comparable to Belgium’s. Landesberger counters that constitutional allocations of competence should not be presumed deliberately incomplete. Nor does the proposed presumption demonstrate practical legal effects: budget conflicts yield no agreed solution through royal privilege, while Meyer himself rejects royal plenitude as a substitute for an absent budget and rejects an independent ordinance power beyond statute.

The review thus finds Meyer’s careful interpretation more persuasive than his inherited conceptual vocabulary. Monarchy’s historical role in establishing constitutional government through self-limitation remains politically important. For Landesberger, however, that genealogy cannot replace legal analysis of institutional competences and the personality of the state.