Prof. Dr. Muharrem Kılıç, director of the center and dean of the Law Faculty at Akdeniz University in Antalya, said at the opening ceremony, "We are memorializing Ernst Hirsch with this new research center that was created to address deficits in the philosophical, historical, and sociological legal research in Turkey." Prof. Dr. Dres. h. c. Philip Kunig, constitutional law expert at Freie Universität Berlin, said that Hirsch had made "groundbreaking and lasting contributions to the legal structure and the field of law" in Turkey. Kunig, along with Professor Emeritus Dr. Hubert Rottleuthner, who was Ernst Hirsch's successor at Freie Universität, and Prof. Dr. Gerhard Seher, was involved in setting up and developing the institute. The library of the new center is named after Hubert Rottleuthner. Part of its collections stem from the library of a discontinued institute in Berlin that had been founded by Ernst Eduard Hirsch.

In 1933, due to his Jewish descent, Eduard Hirsch was dismissed from serving as a judge in Frankfurt am Main, and he became a professor at the universities in Istanbul and Ankara. There he taught philosophy and sociology of law from 1933 to 1952. From 1952 to 1968 he was a professor at Freie Universität Berlin, where he was also the fifth rector of the university from 1953 to 1955.