Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde

Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde

Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde (born September 19, 1930 in Kassel) is one of Germany's foremost legal philosophers and a former judge on the Constitutional Court. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Freiburg and the author of more than 20 books and 80 articles dealing with legal and constitutional theory, as well as political philosophy and Catholic political thought.

Life

Böckenförde received a PhD in law in Münster in 1953, under the supervision of Hans Julius Wolff. He also received a PhD in history in the same year from the University of Munich for a thesis supervised by Franz Schnabel. 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. He became Professor of Public Law, Constitutional History, Legal History and Philosophy of Law at the University of Heidelberg in the same year. In 1969, he moved to the University of Bielefeld, and in 1977 to the University of Freiburg, where he remained until his retirement.

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 German unification, Böckenförde was a member of the Special Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry on Constitutional Reform.

Böckenförde has received numerous awards for his academic and public service commitments, among them Honorary Doctorates from the Faculties of Catholic Theology of the University of Bochum (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 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).

A sentence from a 1964 article of his caused decades of discussion in German and European political thought. It became known as the so-called Böckenförde-paradoxon or Böckenförde-dictum: “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]

Writings translated from German

• Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde (1991): "State, Society, and Liberty: Studies in Political Theory and Constitutional Law". Berg, New York.

• “Carl Schmitt Revisited”. Telos 109 (Fall 1996). New York: Telos Press.
• “The Concept of the Political as the Key to Understanding Carl Schmitt’s Constitutional Theory" in The Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, January 1997, Vol. 10, 5. (Translated by Heiner Bielefeldt from "Der Begriff des Politischen als Schlüssel zum staatsrechtlichen Werk Carl Schmitts (1988)").

See also

• Böckenförde Dilemma

References