Handbook of Constitutional Law German Constitutional Law from a Transnational Perspective

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Klaus Ferdinand Gärditz; Professor Dr. Matthias Herdegen; Professor Dr. Johannes Masing; Professor Dr. Ralf Poscher
• Subject Area: Public Law
• Term: from 2017 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 318208240

The research project aims at a comprehensive presentation of of German constitutional law, which focuses on the Basic Law and its development from a transnational perspective. The handbook shall brought out in a German and an English edition (size about 1500 pages). Rather than summarizing German constitutional doctrine, the book shall self-reflectively analyse and observe German constitutional law from a specifically transnational perspective and, thus integrate it in an international constitutional discourse. Accordingly, the body of German constitutional law and doctrine will be analysed using functional methods of comparative law and constitutional theory. The handbook addresses German and foreign readers alike and will stimulate a transnational constitutional dialogue between different constitutional orders. German readers will benefit from a distanced and reflective observer's perspective on constitutional law, which is hitherto uncommon under German legal doctrine. The handbook will place German constitutional law in its transnational, comparative, and theoretical contexts and confront it with to other legal models and regulatory approaches within the western-liberal traditions of constitutionalism. The foreign reader will obtain information on German constitutional law from a novel perspective, as the handbook will describe constitutional doctrine in comparative, social, historical, political, and theoretical context. This should promote a deeper understanding of how the Constitution and its legal-political institutions operate work in Germany.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants