Stabel was born less than a year after the Battle of Austerlitz, which had triggered the rapid Dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire.
His father, Jakob Stabel was a senior government official in Stockach[7] which, till 1805, was the administrative capital of the Nellenburg Langraviate.
[3][9] After eight years working as a lawyer, in October 1838 he took a government appointment as an Assessor (judicial assistant) at the Court in Mannheim, and in 1840 a public prosecutor.
Respect for his achievements as an advocate between 1830 and 1838, at a time when many of the court and legal ground rules were still in a state of significant flux following the introduction in 1810 of the foreign and in many ways alien "Code Napoléon", was nevertheless widespread among colleagues.
New procedural rules implemented in May 1832 placed a far greater importance on oral pleadings, delivered in open court, than had applied hitherto.
He disliked and avoided lengthy written submissions and shunned the oratorical declamatory phrase-making characteristic - according to German sources - of French advocacy.
[3] In January 1841 Stabel was appointed to a junior judicial post as an "Hofgerichtsrathe", no longer in Mannheim but, closer to the region of his birth and childhood, at Freiburg.
Although the author's preference for oral teaching was well established, he explained that in this case written backup was necessary in order to communicate to his learners, due to the interpretational complexities of the subject.
It is nevertheless worth quoting from his introductory section, both because he felt the need to justify the written format and because of the way he sets out pedagogical precepts to which he would remain faithful through his later career in the law, teaching and politics: "I have not piled in with endless overlapping citations, but have tried to restrict myself to what is necessary to support the assertions and represent the evaluations provided by those making them.
Although these treatises were intended only to clarify matters for his own students, they were disseminated more widely and acquired greater significance than anticipated for the discipline and practical application of civil law Jurisprudence in Baden and subsequently, by extrapolation, in Germany.
[1][3] During 1844/45 Stabel served a term as university pro-rector, and in April 1845 he resigned his remaining public appointment as director of the Freiburg District Court.
However, the time he was able to devote to lecturing at the university was further curtailed in April 1847 when he accepted the "third seat" as a vice-chancellor at the High Court for Baden (which was located at Mannheim between 1810 and 1871).
Sources insist that on account both of his personality and of his formidable reputation in legal circles, his influence on the direction and judgements of the high court quickly surpassed by far that of the Chief Judge.
After several weeks of intensifying uncertainty, on 21 June 1849 Anton Stabel filled one of the resulting vacancies: he accepted a position as President of the Ministry for the Interior and Justice.
Another of Stabel's side-lines for several years, starting in 1854, was the presidency of the commission responsible for the newly introduced Level 2 state law exams.
Admirers assert that he was the principal designer of the syllabus and examination, broadly as they still existed across Germany twenty years after unification.
[1][3] 1860 was a particularly important year both for the development and for the modernisation of government in the Grand Duchy of Baden and in the career of Anton Stabel.
[3] On 24 November 1859 the text of the convention was passed to the First Chamber, with the comment added that "in view of the legislative changes [necessary in Baden and in Rome] special schedules would be submitted to the Landstände".
[1][14] By that time Anton Stabel, in the context of (or possibly exceeding) his responsibilities as Rapporteur for the First Chamber, had produced his own proposals for resolving the accelerating constitutional crisis.
It was intended as a key discussion document for the First Chamber, but before any such discussion took place there came a decisive development on 2 April 1860: the Grand Duke, following the advice of his friend and advisor Baron Franz von Roggenbach following the submission from the Second Chamber of 30 March 1860, dismissed the Stengel-Meysenbug government, and in the words of one source "released its senior members into retirement".
[2][3] Nevertheless, the Grand Duke and his advisors required that Prof. Dr. August Lamey, a liberal lawyer the leading spokesman for the opponents of the convention in the Second Chamber, should also join the government.
Following through with a piece of legislation on which governments had been working since 1851, and based originally on a draft document dating back to 1845, a new judicial constitution since 1851, and based originally on a draft document dating back to 1845, a new judicial constitution was developed and conducted through the first and second chambers of the Landstände between 1861 and 1864.
With this organisational structure the Grand Duchy of Baden created, during the early 1860s, almost exactly the same justice system as that which would be adopted by post-unification Germany fifteen years later.
As Prussia's dispute with Austria turned into war, the government of Baden under Stabel's leadership pursued a resolutely law-based approach.
Als erweiterte Fortsetzung der oberhofgerichtlichen Jahrbücher", an extended version of the Year Book for the Baden High Court, and in 1867 the first volume of it was published.