During his career at Berlin University's law department, Gierke was a leading critic of the first draft of a new Civil Code for Imperial Germany.

Beseler was an expert on German law and Gierke received his doctorate for a thesis on the obligations arising from medieval fiefdom (Lebensschulden).

[7] Gierke became a vocal critic of the 1888 draft for a Civil Code to harmonize private law on property, family, and obligations, following the Unification of Germany in 1871.

[8] Gierke formulated a historic critique of the draft civil code by relying on ancient and medieval German laws that the jurist and folklorist Jacob Grimm had collected on the municipality (Gemeinde) and the Mark currency.

[9] Throughout 1888 and 1889 Gierke criticized the draft civil code in articles that were published in the leading German language economics journal.

Its editor Gustav von Schmoller took the view that the norms of the Roman law tradition did not adequately support the business models of a market economy that was industrialized.

[10] Gierke further bolstered his critique of the draft civil code by publishing the first of a three-volume opus on German private law (Deutsches Privatrecht) in 1895.

Gierke was especially opinionated when criticizing the tenancy law in the new draft for ignoring the burning issues in modern German cities.

He demanded that the German civil code should protect tenants against usury by placing legal restrictions on the freedom of contract.

In May 1919 at the age of seventy-eight Gierke rallied his academic colleagues to build a new Germany based on Germanic traditions: "We are a people, with thousands of years of history".

He declared that the state in Germany should remain an organically built community along Germanic traditions, where municipalities and local governments are autonomous and derive their legal existence from the association of citizens.

Social jurists argued that the norm of property, contract and tort should not govern all aspects of commercial and private interactions.

His son Edgar von Gierke was a highly respected pathologist who discovered glycogen storage disease type I in 1929.