Ehrlich studied law in Lemberg, then in Vienna, where he taught and practised as a lawyer before returning to Czernowitz to teach at the university there, a bastion of Germanic culture at the eastern edge of the Empire.
After the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the ceding of the Bukovina to Romania, Ehrlich planned to return to Czernowitz, where he would have been required to teach in Romanian, but he died of diabetes in Vienna, Austria in 1922.
Ehrlich claimed that the living law that regulates social life may be very different from the norms for decision applied by courts, and may sometimes attract far greater cultural authority which lawyers cannot safely ignore.
What counts as law (again, from a sociological perspective) depends on what kind of authority exists to give it legal significance among those it is supposed to regulate.
In addition, legal norms are recognisable as such because they concern certain kinds of relationships, transactions and circumstances which he described as 'facts of the law' (Tatsachen des Rechts) — specially important topics or considerations for social regulation.