Born on 31 August 1798 at Kadolzburg in Bavaria, Puchta came of an old Bohemian Protestant family which had immigrated into Germany to avoid religious persecution.

[1] From 1811 to 1816 Puchta attended the Egidiengymnasium at Nuremberg, during the headmastership of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, an eminent German philosopher.

Puchta said about the faculty of Erlangen: "Jede Universität ist freilich mit einem Pfahl im Fleisch geplagt, aber die hiesige Fakultät hat, wenn Glück stirbt, nichts als Pfähle".

[6] His chief merit as a jurist lay in breaking with past unscientific methods in the teaching of Roman law and in making its spirit intelligible to students.

[1] Kleine civilistische Schriften (1851), edited by Adolph August Friedrich Rudorff, is a collection of essays on various branches of Roman law, and the preface contains a sympathetic biographical sketch of the jurist.