Hans-Jürgen Papier

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Hans-Jürgen Papier (* 6 July 1943 in Berlin) is a German scholar of constitutional law and, as of April 2002, President of the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany.

Three years after graduating from law school in 1967, Papier completed a Ph.D. dissertation at the 1970 at the Freie Universität Berlin. In 1973 he received his Habilitation on the basis of a second dissertation on questions concerning German constitutional law.

From 1974 onward Papier received tenure at the Universität Bielefeld and taught constitutional law. In 1992 he moved to Munich to teach German and Bavarian constitutional and administrative law as well as Public Social law at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität.

In 1998 Papier, a member of the conservative CSU party, became Vice-President and Chair of the First Senate of the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany. When Chief Justice Jutta Limbach retired from her position in 2002, Papier succeeded her.

In general, Papier is wary of making political comments in public. He made an exception to this rule after the elections of 2005 when he implored the parties to work hard not to lose the trust of the German electorate.