Rudolf Stammler was a German neo-Kantian legal philosopher. His first major work, Die Lehre vom richtigen Recht, outlined his philosophy of law, which was elaborated in subsequent works. Stammler sought to apply Immanuel Kant's distinction between pure and practical reason to the law. The embodiment of pure reason in legal theory is the concept of law, which Stammler defined as "combining sovereign and inviolable volition." The counterpart of practical reason is the idea of law, that is, the realm of purposes realized by volition. But whereas for Kant practical reason was not, like pure reason, a matter of intellectual perception, but of morality, Stammler sought to formulate a theoretically valid idea of justice. He based it on the community of purposes and the fact that man is a reasonable being, an end in himself. From this he derived two "principles of respect" and two...