Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde is one of Germany"s foremost legal philosophers and a former judge on the Constitutional Court.
Education
Böckenförde received a Doctor of Philosophy in law in Münster in 1956, under the supervision of Hans Julius Wolff. He also received a Doctor of Philosophy in history in 1960 from the University of Munich for a thesis supervised by Franz Schnabel.
Career
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. 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. A sentence from a 1964 article of his caused decades of discussion in German and European political thought.
lieutenant 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.
Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde (1991): "State, Society, and Liberty: Studies in Political Theory and Constitutional Law".
Berg, New 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, Volume 10, 5. (Translated by Heiner Bielefeldt from "Der Begriff des Politischen als Schlüssel zum staatsrechtlichen Werk Carl Schmitts (1988)").
Politics
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. On the other hand, it is not able to guarantee these forces of inner regulation by itself without renouncing its liberalism.”.
Membership
Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. North Rhine-Westphalia Academy for Sciences and Arts]
Böckenförde is considered as a member of the Ritter-School. Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde served as a member of the second Senate of the Federal Constitutional Court from 1983 until 1996.
From 1971 until 1976 Böckenförde was a member of the Special Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry on Constitutional Reform.