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Political Innovation of the West German Federal Constitutional Court: The State of Discussion on Judicial Review*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Fritz Nova
Fritz Nova*
Affiliation:
Villanova University
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Abstract

The Watergate controversies and especially the recent decision in Richard M. Nixon versus the United States on July 24, 1974 have again raised in the United States the problem of the political limits to judicial policy making and the need to strike a new balance among the three branches of government for preserving and maintaining a democratic policy. In this paper, which is based on largely primary judicial, political, and academic German sources up to the year 1972, the development of jurisprudence of the West German Federal Constitutional Court is analyzed and discussed, particularly the Court's experience with judicial review. The article is geared toward the student of comparative constitutionalism and comparative government, offering possible lessons to the United States and other Common Law constitutional courts. Less concerned with the practical work of the Court, except for brief comments on actual performance, the paper focuses on such problems as past and present German approval and disapproval of the notion of judicial review, the often erudite disputation on the merits of constitutional—especially “creative”—jurisprudence; the discussion on the political limits of judicial review; and trends in particular philosophical positions of the Court in contemporary West Germany.

Type
Articles
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 70 , Issue 1 , March 1976 , pp. 114 - 125
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1976

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Footnotes

*

This study is the result of research which was made possible by the author's Senior Fulbright Lectureship at the Seminar Fuer Politische Wissenschaft of the Friedrich Wilhelms University of Bonn, 1971–1972.

References

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31 Leibholz, , “Legal Philosophy and the Federal Constitutional Court,” in Politics and Law, ed. Leibholz, Gerhard (Leyden: A. W. Sythoff, 1965), p. 299 Google Scholar.

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70 Reported in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 12 9, 1971, No. 285, p. 7 Google Scholar.

71 Cf. Leibholz, , “Legal Philosophy and the Federal Constitutional Court,” pp. 298–299 Google Scholar. It may be deemed as a non sequitur, but we should like to point out here parenthetically that the limited acceptance of judicial activity and the small appreciation for the subjective importance of the West German judges are reflected by the quite embryonic literature and meagerness of behavioral and statistical data on the constitutional judges on the Federal Republic. A promising sign of beginning, at least for other higher judges, is Richter's, Walter “Die Richter der Oberlandesgerichte der Bundedrepublik, eine berufliche und sozialstatistische Analyse,” in Hamburger Jahrbuch fuer Wirtschafts- und Gesellschaftspolitik, 5 (1960), 241–259 Google Scholar, and Dahrendorf, Ralf, “Deutsche Richter: Ein Beitrag zur Soziologie der Oberschicht,” in Gesellschaft und Freiheit: Zur Soziologischen Analyse der Gegenwart (Munich: R. Riper & Co. 1962), pp. 176–196 Google Scholar. Cf. also the highly sophisticated discussions on the newly created members of the FCC in the Frankfurter A llgemeine Zeitung, December 8, 1971, No. 284. Of significance is also No. 294 of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of December 18, 1971, in which Friedrich Karl Fromme's article, “Ein neues Wahlverfahren fuer die Verfassungsrichter,” p. 2, criticizes the former Federal President Heinemann's statement that the several candidates for the FCC had been too much discussed in public. Fromme condemns any prohibition of public discussions on the personal background and makeup of prospective judges and considers a return to the old-fashioned “rein sachliche Richterbestellung” (purely factual appointment to the judgeship) obsolete and hypocritical, in view of the political criterion of their present form of appointment. For updated comments on literature on the problems discussed in this paper see Schaefer, Rudolf, “Politikwissenschaftliche Analysen des Bundesverfassungsgerichts,” in Neue Politische Literatur, No. 2, 1974, p. 209 Google Scholar, and Maunz, Theodor, Deutsches Staatsrecht: Ein Studienbuch (Munich: C. H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1973), pp. 283–284 Google Scholar.

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