From the 1950s onwards however, a school of German legal scholars developed the alternative view that the Allies had only taken custody of German sovereignty while the former German state had been rendered powerless to act; and that consequently, once a freely constituted German government had come into being in the form of the Federal Republic, it would resume the identity and legal status of the former German Reich without requiring any formal devolution of sovereignty from the institutions of the Allied Control Council (which were by then, moribund).[4]