Pavel Novgorodtsev

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Pavel Ivanovich Novgorodtsev (Russian: Па́вел Ива́нович Новгоро́дцев; 28 February 1866 – 23 April 1924) was a Russian lawyer and philosopher. He was born in Bakhmut and finished his law degree at Moscow University in 1888. He studied in Berlin and Paris and then returned to Moscow University, where he earned his doctorate in 1903. He became a professor and played a political role as a member of the Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets). In 1906 he was elected deputy to the First State Duma and signed the Vyborg Manifesto. He also served as director and professor at the Moscow Commercial Institute.

Ivan Ilyin was one of his students. During World War I, Novgorodtsev worked with the Union of Cities and served as Moscow Commissioner of the Special Meeting on Fuel. In the Russian Civil War he supported the White side and left the Crimea in 1920. He lived in Berlin from 1922 to 1924, then moved to Prague, where he became Dean of the Russian Faculty of Law at Charles University shortly before his death. He died in Prague on 23 April 1924 and is buried in the Orthodox section of Olšany Cemetery.

In 1903 he edited Problems of Idealism, which included his essay Moral idealism in the philosophy of law. He was a Neo-Kantian who believed natural law provides a moral standard to judge and improve positive law. In his 1911 work The Crisis of Modern Legal Consciousness, he argued that ideas for solving modern social and moral problems were utopian and criticized the theory of scientific socialism as utopian.