Hugo Preuss

Hugo Preuss (1860 to 1925) was a German lawyer and liberal politician and the author of the draft version of the constitution that the Weimar National Assembly passed and that came into force in August 1919. He based it on three principles: that all political authority belongs to the people, that the state should be organized on a federal basis, and that the Reich should form a democratic Rechtsstaat within the international community. Born in Berlin to a Jewish family, he studied law and political science and took a doctorate of law at Göttingen in 1883. His Jewish religion and democratic-liberal views kept him from a tenured professorship at the University of Berlin, and he became a full professor at the Berlin School of Commerce in 1906.