Gustav Radbruch
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Gustav Radbruch, born November 21, 1878 in Lübeck; died November 23, 1949 in Heidelberg, was a German law professor, most famous for the Radbruchsche Formel (Radbruch's formula) which states that where statutory law is incompatible with the requirements of justice "to an intolerable degree", or where statutory law was obviously designed in a way that negates on purpose "the equality that is the core of all justice", statutory law must be disregarded by a judge in justice's favour. He developed this principle in response to the Nazi era, and since its first publication in 1946 the principle has been accepted by Germany's Federal Constitutional Court in a variety of cases. It has meant a shift from the legal positivism of the older German legal tradition, which many people blame partially for the ease of the outwardly legal rise of Hitler to power, to a concept of natural law more in tune with Anglo-Saxon legal tradition.
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