Career
After studying law in Würzburg with honors (1894) and Habilitation (1898), he became professor in Rostock (1900), Erlangen (1903), Würzburg (1913) and Göttingen (1919). After he had applied in earlier works the concept of rights from Immanuel Kant (as in: "Legal concept and idea of law" from the year 1915), he later became a strong critic of Neokantian legal philosophy, especially the philosophy of law of Rudolf Stammler. In addition, Binder, along with others such as Ernst Forsthoff, Carl Schmitt, Karl Larenz among legal philosophers, did not criticize the Nazi legal system.
Views
He is principally known as an opponent of legal positivism, and for having remained as an active scholar during the 1930s in Nazi Germany who did not speak out against the prevailing government of that time. Since the 1920s, Julius Binder—and later along with Karl Larenz, Gerhard Dulckeit and Walther Schönfeld –- he applied a Neohegelian approach to jurisprudence in the system of the so-called "objective idealism". He rejected legal positivism.
Membership
He founded the "International Hegel Federal" and became a member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences. Since 1890 he was a member of the Corps Bavaria Würzburg.