After the fashion of German students, Savigny visited several universities, notably Jena, Leipzig and Halle; and returning to Marburg, took his doctorate in 1800.

The same year he embarked on an extensive tour through France and south Germany in search of fresh sources of Roman law.

Here, in connection with the faculty of law, he created a Spruch-Collegium, an extraordinary tribunal competent to deliver opinions on cases remitted to it by the ordinary courts; and he took an active part in its labours.

He was engaged in lecturing, in government of the university (of which he was the third rector), and as tutor to the crown prince in Roman, criminal and Prussian law.

In 1814 Savigny wrote the pamphlet Vom Beruf unserer Zeit für Gesetzgebung und Rechtswissenschaft [de; ja] (Of the Vocation of our Age for Legislation and Legal Science).

In his view, the damage that had been caused by the neglect of former generations of jurists could not be quickly repaired, and more time was required to set the house in order.

It was Savigny's opinion that legal science should be saved from the "hollow abstractions" of such a work as Christian Wolff's Institutiones juris naturae et gentium.

According to Savigny, Roman law, although considered dead, lived on in local customs, in towns, in ecclesiastical doctrines and school teachings, until it once again reappeared in Bologna and other Italian cities.

In 1835 Savigny began his elaborate work on contemporary Roman law, System des heutigen römischen Rechts (8 vols., 1840–1849).

His activity as professor ceased in March 1842, when he was appointed "Grosskanzler" (High Chancellor), the head of the Prussian legal system.

In 1850, on the occasion of the jubilee of obtaining his doctor's degree, appeared in five volumes his Vermischte Schriften (Miscellaneous Writings), consisting of a collection of minor works published between 1800 and 1844.

Savigny belongs to the German historical school of jurists, founded by Gustav Hugo, and served a role in its consolidation.

He opposed the idea, common to French 18th century jurists and Bentham, that law can be arbitrarily imposed on a country irrespective of its state of civilization and history.