Ernst-Wolfgang Bockenforde

Ernst-Wolfgang Bockenforde was a German legal scholar and constitutional judge who lived from 1930 to 2019. He earned doctorates in both law and history and held professorships at Heidelberg, Bielefeld and Freiburg, specializing in public law, constitutional history and legal philosophy, before serving as a justice on the second senate of Germany's Federal Constitutional Court from 1983 to 1996, where he took part in landmark rulings on missile deployment, political party law and abortion regulation. He is best known for what became known as the Bockenforde dilemma, the argument, first made in a 1964 article, that the liberal secular state lives on premises that it cannot itself guarantee, a formulation that has shaped decades of debate over the foundations of liberal democracy. He wrote more than twenty books and eighty articles on constitutional law and political theory and received Germany's Grand Cross of Merit in 2016.