In Germany, public law emerged as a separate discipline at the threshold of the seventeenth century. The first legal tracts on public law discussed two main issues: the powers of jurisdiction, and the rights of the sovereigns (iura regalia). The rights of the sovereigns included rights to impose and collect taxes, coining, public properties, public roads, and expropriation of private property. These rights were often described as powers on the goods of private citizens, and justified referring to the common good, public utility, or public health (publica salus).
What notion of common good was adopted in these legal treatises? How were the privileges of the sovereigns balanced with private rights? This paper proposes to investigate these and other similar questions in a selected number of works by the first German theoreticians of public law. Sources will include Jakob Bornitz’s (1560-1625), De maiestate politica et summo imperio (1610), Henning Arnisaeus’s (1570-1636), De iure maiestatis libri tres (1610), Dietrich Reinking’s (1590-1664), Tractatus de regimine seculari et ecclesiastico (1619), Joseph Limnaeus’s (1592-1664), Iuris publici imperii romano-germanici libri novem (1629), and others.