Ernst Forsthoff

After the war, he was dismissed from governmental service by order of the American military government, but was able to resume teaching in 1952.

In a seminal 1938 paper, he coined the term Daseinsvorsorge, introducing the concept of public services to German legal thinking.

After the war, although now supporting the democratic Rechtsstaat (which he understood as opposed to the Sozialstaat advocated by the Left), Forsthoff continued to support a powerful state subject to only limited judicial constraints and rejected the notion of constitutional rights as a normative framework of society.

Forsthoff was among the few postwar European scholars who maintained adherence to the philosophy of strict legal positivism.

His influential textbook Lehrbuch des Verwaltungsrechts (1950) also emphasized the comprehensive responsibility of the state for society, preferring to focus on the functioning of government rather than on its possible failure.