Influenced by his family, particularly his uncle, he joined the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party (RSLDP) in Saint Petersburg at the age of 17.

As a result of his socialist activism, the Czarist police threatened Pashukanis with banishment, so he left Russia for Germany in 1910.

Following the 1917 October Revolution and the establishment of Soviet Russia, Pashukanis joined the Russian Communist Party (b), after its founding in 1918.

He also held a post in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and was an adviser to the Soviet embassy in Berlin, helping to draft the Rapallo Treaty of 1922.

This theory was built on two pillars of Marxist thought: (1) in the organization of society the economic factor is paramount; legal and moral principles and institutions therefore constitute a kind of superstructure reflecting the economic organization of society; and (2) in the finally achieved state of communism, law and the state will wither away.

Furthermore, Pashukanis argued that the theories of the Kelsenian positivists were simply "confined exclusively to ordering the various normative contents in a logically determined manner," and that the pure theory of law "explains nothing, and turns its back from the outset on the facts of reality, that is of social life..."[5] From 1925 to 1927, Pyotr Stuchka, another Soviet legal scholar, and Pashukanis compiled an Encyclopedia of State and Law and started a journal named Revolution of Law.

[6] In 1936, he was appointed as Deputy People's Commissar of Justice of the USSR and was proposed for membership in the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

[8] After publishing many self-criticisms, Pashukanis was eventually denounced as a "Trotskyite saboteur" in 1937 and executed in September 1937 on charges of being involved in an "underground anti-Soviet terrorist organisation".