 In a seminal 1938 paper, he coined the term "Daseinsvorsorge", introducing the concept of public services to German legal thinking.After the war, although now supporting the democratic "Rechtsstaat" (which he understood as opposed to the "Sozialstaat" advocated by the Left), Forsthoff continued to support a powerful state subject to only limited judicial constraints and rejected the notion of constitutional rights as a normative framework of society.Forsthoff was among the few postwar European scholars who maintained adherence to the philosophy of strict legal positivism.