Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde (born September 19, 1930 in Kassel) is a German judge and legal philosopher.
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In 1953 he received a PhD in law as well as in philosophy. In 1964 he made his postdoctoral habilitation with his thesis The power of organisation in the purview of the government. A survey on constitutional law in the Federal Republic of Germany. Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde was a judge in the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany from 1983 to 1996.
Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde served as a member of the second Senate of the Federal Constitutional Court from 1982 until 1996. Into his tenure fall several path-breaking decisions for the Federal Republic of Germany, including decisions pertaining to the deployment of missiles, to the law of political parties, and to the legal regulation of abortion.
After receiving a Dr. iur. and a Dr. phil., he completed his habilitation in Münster in 1964. Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde has taught as a professor of Public Law, Constitutional History, Legal History, Philosophy of Law at the University of Heidelberg, the University of Bielefeld and the University of Freiburg.
Böckenförde was a member of the Special Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry on Constitutional Reform. He has received various awards for his academic and public service commitments: Honorary Doctorates from the Faculties of Catholic Theology of Bochum University (1999) and of Tübingen University (2005), from the Law Schools of Bielefeld University (1999), of the University of Münster (2001) and of the University of Basel (1987).
He is most famous for his quote: “The liberal secular state lives on premises that it cannot itself guarantee. On the one hand, it can subsist only if the freedom it consents to its citizens is regulated from within, inside the moral substance of individuals and of a homogeneous society. On the other hand, it is not able to guarantee these forces of inner regulation by itself without renouncing its liberalism.”[1]
He has also received the Reuchlin Award of the City of Pforzheim (1978), the Guardini Award of the Catholic Academy in Bavaria (2004) and the Hannah-Arendt Award for Political Thought (2004).
Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde (1991): State, Society, and Liberty: Studies in Political Theory and Constitutional Law. Berg, New York.