[1] He supported the view, not always well accepted by governments, that since the State was part of society, it must be judged in the same courts as individual citizens.
[2] Bähr was born in Fulda, then as now a small historic town slightly more than 100 km (65 miles) north-east of Frankfurt in a region of the former Holy Roman Empire, at the time still with a somewhat ambiguous constitutional status, known as the Electorate of Hesse.
[1] In 1848 Otto Bähr was a member of a commission established to codify the administration of civil justice in the Electorate of Hesse.
[4] After the events of 1866, whereby the Electorate of Hesse lost its independence, in September 1867 Bähr was accepted as a high court judge in the Prussian justice service, headquartered in Berlin.
In 1867 he became a member of the short-lived North German Reichstag,[6] where he remained till the body was dissolved at the end of 1870.