Leon Duguit (1859 - 1928) is a lawyer French specialist in public Droit. He is the inventor of a method: Sociological positivism.

Colleague of Durkheim, he becomes public law professor and senior of the Université of Bordeaux. He is 6th with the contest of Agrégation of public law, whereas Maurice Hauriou is the first .

He is the principal representative of what one called “the school of the Public service”, also known under the name of " school of Bordeaux" (Leon Duguit, Gaston Jèze, Roger Bonnard). He was opposed to Maurice Hauriou, senior of the faculty of Toulouse, the school of the Public power.

Duguit has the appearance of a precursor of a legal theory of the State and right. It thus borrows from Durkheim its sociological methodology and from Auguste Count the Positivisme. This double heritage authorizes an original approach of the discipline of the right which is characterized by a criticism of the existing theories of the right, on the one hand and, on the other hand, by the establishment of the concept of public service which founds the State and its limit. Duguit thus draws aside the designs metaphysics of the State such as the sovereignty or the concept of moral person (Jèze will underline the fictivity of this concept in its famous sentence: “I never lunched with a Moral person”).

Leon Duguit is large a critic of the right, defender of the theory of the social function of the right of the property. For him, the owner is invested of a given social function: " His property right, I deny it, his social duty, I it affirme."

It makes a criticism of the State and supports that this last is only one political method. The State is a precarious form, as it appeared, it can disappear. However, Duguit dissociates Marxists because he thinks that the economy of a prevalent role in the development of the State. He will develop a theory anchored thus on the left, and especially justifying the interventionism of the State.

Duguit says positivist in his step: he claims to analyze in the State by the observation of the company and what it must be. It is thus its scientific step which is positivist and not his legal position (rather utopian in what it from there will be unaware of the public power of the State). Besides it will reproach Jèze for being too juridically a positivist in his analyzes of the public dedication of the service by jurisprudence.

Works

• the State, objective right and the positive law

• the State controlling them and the agents
• Sovereignty and freedom To read in line
• the transformations of the public law
• Constitutional treaty .