He is principally known as an opponent of legal positivism, and for having remained as an active scholar during the 1930s in Nazi Germany who did not speak out against the prevailing government of that time.

He joined the Corps Bavaria Würzburg [de] political party in 1890 and stayed in it the rest of his life.

[2] In 1915, he wrote Rechtsbegriff und Rechtidee, which applied the concept of rights from Immanuel Kant to the legal system.

Since the 1920s, Julius Binder—and later along with Karl Larenz, Gerhard Dulckeit [de], and Walther Schönfeld—applied a Neohegelian approach to jurisprudence in the system of the so-called "objective idealism".

Binder was the academic teacher of the German legal philosopher and civil law proponent Karl Larenz.