Alfred Söllner

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Alfred Söllner (born February 5, 1930 in Frankfurt am Main ; † November 9, 2005 in Gießen ) was a German legal scholar and a judge at the Federal Constitutional Court from 1987 to 1995 .

Life

Childhood and legal education

Söllner was the only child of Georg Söllner, brewer and works council chairman at Binding , and Anna Söllner, nee Huckschlag. The family was of the Catholic faith and rejected National Socialism . In 1938 he moved with his parents from Frankfurt to nearby Neu-Isenburg , where he attended the Goethe Realgymnasium from 1940. In the last days of the Second World War he was drafted into the Volkssturm . After graduating from high school, which he passed with distinction in 1949, he began to study law at the University of Frankfurt am Main in 1950, completing the first state examination in 1954. Here he had heard lectures from Helmut Coing , Adalbert Erler , Wolfgang Preiser and Helmut Ridder , among others .

In 1955 he completed his legal clerkship in the Frankfurt Higher Regional Court district . In the winter semester of 1957/58 he gave Latin courses for lawyers for the first time at the University of Frankfurt am Main , which he offered repeatedly in the following years. His dissertation also dealt with Roman law : with Helmut Coing, who suggested this choice of topics, he received his doctorate in 1958 on the "causa in the conditions and contract law of the Middle Ages with glossators, commentators and canonists". The work was awarded the Walter Kolb Memorial Prize of the City of Frankfurt am Main and published in the journal of the Savigny Foundation for Legal History in 1960 .

University career in Kiel and Giessen

After the assessor exam in 1959, Söllner wanted to continue his university career. However, there was currently no vacancy at the Romance Institute of his doctoral supervisor. Therefore he became a research assistant to Helmut Isele at the Institute for Labor Law . He married in 1962. In 1966 he completed his habilitation on the one-sided performance determination in the employment relationship . Ten years before the General Terms and Conditions Act came into force, he designed a system for monitoring employment contracts. In the same year he was appointed full professor for Roman law, civil law , labor law and social law at the University of Kiel . In 1969 he submitted a second habilitation thesis "On the history and function of the actio rei uxoriae ". A year later he joined the CDU .

In 1970 he took over a chair at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen while retaining his previous range of subjects . In 1974/75 he was Dean of the Faculty of Law. In 1976 he was offered a call to the University of Göttingen as well as to his alma mater in Frankfurt, but decided to stay at the Giessen University. There he held the office of Vice President from April 1985 to March 1987 and was also charged with managing the President's affairs for a few months. In 1997 he retired.

Judge of the Federal Constitutional Court

In 1987, at the suggestion of the CDU, he was appointed judge of the Federal Constitutional Court, where he was a member of the First Senate until 1995. His responsibility included social law. For example, he was the rapporteur in the procedures for taking child-rearing periods into account in the statutory pension insurance , for crediting income when granting unemployment benefits , for the employer's obligation to reimburse according to Section 128 AFG , for equal treatment of workers and salaried employees with regard to the notice periods , for the waiting loop regulation in the unification agreement and for constitutionality of the " strike paragraph " § 116 AFG.

Together with his colleagues Evelyn Haas and Otto Seidl , he gave a special vote on the crucifix resolution and the decision on the concept of violence in sit- ins. In the proceedings initiated by the postal union on the admissibility of civil servants' strike work, he submitted an application for self-rejection according to §§ 19 (3) BVerfGG , since in 1982 he submitted an expert opinion on this question on behalf of the main board of the German Railway Workers Union and the strike work therein declared incompatible with the principles of industrial action law. The Federal Constitutional Court declared the self-rejection to be justified and then classified the strike work, for which there was no explicit legal basis, as unconstitutional without his participation. Although his term of office would not have ended until 1998, he resigned from the Federal Constitutional Court at his own request in October 1995 because he wanted to devote himself more to his scientific interests.

further activities

Söllner was a member of the Expert Commission for a Labor Code from 1970 to 1977. He was also a scientific member of the Max Planck Society and a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz . In April 1980, together with Meinhard Heinze, he founded the first “Gießener Labor Law Practitioner Seminar”, which took place in 1990 for the hundredth time. He was a member of various company arbitration bodies and was repeatedly appointed as an arbitrator in labor disputes . His work as an arbitrator in collective bargaining by the Deutsche Bundesbahn and as chairman of the arbitration tribunal for the metal industry should be mentioned in particular . He was also co-editor of the Zeitschrift für Arbeitsrecht .

plant

Söllner's primary academic fields of activity were Roman law and labor law. While his interest in Romance studies was influenced by Helmut Coing and good Latin lessons, Heinrich Hoeniger and his father shaped his inclination to labor law.

He wrote three textbooks: The “Outline of Labor Law” was supervised by him from 1969 to the 12th edition in 1998. It was the first shorter modern presentation of labor law and took into account the basics of labor law and the peculiarities of collective labor law. His "Introduction to Roman Legal History" was published for the first time in 1971 and was published in four more editions by 1996. With Hans Jochen Reinert, he worked on a textbook on employee representation law , which appeared in two editions in 1985 and 1993.

He also wrote 150 essays, 80 comments on judgments and 40 book reviews. A number of important contributions to labor and social law are gathered in the work “Labor law in the constitutional order of the Basic Law” (1994). He also took part in the Munich commentary and commented in two editions, including sections 611 to 611b BGB ( service contract ). In the last years of his life he devoted himself increasingly to Roman law. His last essay, "Bona fides - good faith ?", Published shortly before his death in the journal of the Savigny Foundation for Legal History, proves that bona fides in Roman property law not only describes good faith, but as a normative term of after Righteousness, business ethics and business ethics are to be understood as being true to the contract ( good faith ).

Söllner viewed labor law as regulatory law and not unilaterally as employee protection law. Self-determination was his primary goal of liberal legal thinking. He was conservative about judicial law. He saw the task of the courts not in social engineering , but in the just decision of the individual case.

honors and awards

  • Faculty celebration for the 60th birthday (historical law: ars tradendo innovandoque aequitatem sectandi, 1990)
  • Large Cross of Merit of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany with star and shoulder ribbon (1995)
  • Festschrift on the occasion of the 70th birthday (Europe's universal legal policy task in the law of the third millennium, 2000)
  • Hessian Order of Merit (1990)

literature

  • Hermann Heussner : Alfred Söllner 60 years. In: Arbeit und Recht 1990, p. 43f.
  • C. Katharina Schockenmöhle: Alfred Söllner. Judge at the Federal Constitutional Court. In: Bernhard Großfeld / Herbert Roth (ed.): Constitutional judge. Finding law at the US Supreme Court and the Federal Constitutional Court. Lit Verlag, Münster-Hamburg 1995 (Münsteraner Studies on Comparative Law, Volume 5), ISBN 3-8258-2264-8 , pp. 449–459.
  • Wolf-Dietrich Walker : Alfred Söllner on his 70th birthday. In: Neue Juristische Wochenschrift 2000, pp. 408f.
  • Wolfgang Zöllner : Alfred Söllner for his seventieth. In: Zeitschrift für Arbeitsrecht 2000, pp. 1–3.
  • Reinhard Richardi : Alfred Söllner on his 75th birthday. In: Neue Juristische Wochenschrift 2005, p. 346.
  • Alfred Söllner died. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of November 11, 2005.
  • Wolfgang Hromadka : Alfred Söllner †. In: New Journal for Labor Law 2006, p. 26f.
  • Gerhard Köbler : Alfred Söllner †. In: Neue Juristische Wochenschrift 2006, p. 972.
  • Raimund Waltermann: Alfred Söllner †. In: Law of Labor 2006, p. 52f.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Schockenmöhle, p. 449.
  2. ^ FAZ of November 11, 2005.
  3. Schockenmöhle, p. 449; Walker, p. 408.
  4. a b Hromadka, p. 26; Köbler, p. 972.
  5. Cf. Alfred Söllner: One-sided performance determination in the employment relationship (= treatises of the humanities and social science class of the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz. Born in 1966, No. 1).
  6. a b c Hromadka, p. 26.
  7. BVerfGE 87, 1 - rubble women
  8. BVerfGE 87, 234 - Income offsetting
  9. BVerfGE 81, 156 - Employment Promotion Act 1981
  10. BVerfGE 82, 126 - Notice periods for workers
  11. BVerfGE 84, 133 - waiting loop
  12. BVerfGE 92, 365 - Short-time work allowance
  13. BVerfGE 92, 1 - Sit-In Blockades II
  14. Schockenmöhle, p. 455; Söllner's legal remarks in Arbeit und Recht 1982, p. 233ff.
  15. BVerfGE 88, 1
  16. BVerfGE 88, 103 - Strikes by officials
  17. ^ Walker, p. 409.
  18. ^ Zöllner, p. 2.
  19. a b Waltermann, p. 53.
  20. Hromadka, p. 26f.