Clarity of standards

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Clarity of norms is a requirement for legal norms to apply .

meaning

If a law is incomprehensible ( perplexed ) for the addressee with regard to its facts or its legal consequences , then compliance with it cannot be demanded. The right to compliance with a parliamentary law is canceled by the Federal Constitutional Court declaring it null and void as part of a constitutional review of norms ( Section 78 , Section 82 (1 ) BVerfGG ).

content

In particular, a law must be linguistically understandable, free of internal contradictions (internal consistency), not prone to errors and editorially precise, systematically structured and free from legal systematic breaks (external consistency). It must be possible to determine the content by way of interpretation using conventional legal methods. The frequent use of indeterminate legal terms, which can hardly be defined in terms of language , an extensive text length, a confusing legal structure as well as an accumulation and grading of rule-exception techniques, multiple references and contradicting legal consequences are incompatible with the requirement of clarity of the norms.

Norm truth also belongs to norm clarity. If the legislature chooses a fee that is strictly limited in terms of wording, it cannot be asserted that it also pursued other, unnamed fee purposes.

Reason

The Federal Constitutional Court assigns the requirement of clarity of norms, closely following the requirement of certainty, to the rule of law. On the other hand, parts of the constitutional literature do not differentiate between the requirement of certainty and the clarity of norms.

The Federal Constitutional Court itself describes the requirement as follows, for example:

"The requirement of norms and norms clarity [...] should enable those affected to recognize the legal situation on the basis of the legal regulation so that they can adjust their behavior accordingly. The certainty requirements also serve to bind the administration and to limit its behavior according to content, purpose and extent and, if it is active to protect others, to specify the protection mandate in more detail. One of the requirements is that sufficiently clear standards are provided for weighing decisions. The more imprecisely the requirements for the relevant actual initial situation are described by law, the greater the risk of inappropriate assignment of legally significant issues. The certainty of the norm should also protect against abuse, be it by the state itself or - insofar as the norm regulates the legal relationships between citizens - also by them. This aspect is particularly important when citizens are not involved in a measure affecting them or are not even aware of it, so that they cannot pursue their interests themselves. Finally, the determination of the norms and the clarity of the norms serve to put the courts in a position to control measures taken on the basis of legal standards.
These requirements are not met by a standard that provides an identically formulated standard for different situations and is to be used in them with different content. It also does not do justice to the special statutory duty to protect - here following from Article 2, Paragraph 1 and Article 14, Paragraph 1 of the Basic Law , if the test standard is so imprecisely described that it does not provide sufficient indications for the fulfillment of the protective task. "

The literature partly complements the aspect of legal security .

In individual cases, the requirement of clarity of standards is also standardized by simple law, for example in Section 2 (3) Measure Act.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Emanuel Vahid Towfigh: Complexity and clarity of norms - or: Laws are made for lawyers Preprints of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods , Bonn 2008/22, p. 10 ff.
  2. ↑ cf. for example BVerfG, judgment of July 27, 2005 - 1 BvR 668/04 para. 114 ff.
  3. ↑ BVerfG, judgment of March 19, 2003 - 2 BvL 9/98 et al . 64
  4. ↑ BVerfG, judgment of October 23, 1951, 2 BvG 1/51, BVerfGE 1, 14 (45); Judgment of May 30, 1956, 1 BvF 3/53, BVerfGE 5, 25 (31); Decision of January 12, 1967, 1 BvR 169/63, BVerfGE 21, 73 (79); Decision of July 7, 1971, 1 BvR 775/66, BVerfGE 31, 255 (264); Decision of June 12, 1979, 1 BvL 19/76, BVerfGE 52, 1 (41); Decision of November 24, 1981, 2 BvL 4/80, BVerfGE 59, 104 (114); Decision of March 8, 1983, 2 BvL 27/81, BVerfGE 63, 312 (323 f.); Decision of May 31, 1988, 1 BvR 520/83, BVerfGE 78, 214 (226); Judgment of 19.3.2003, 2 BvL 9-12 / 98, BVerfGE 108, 1 (20); Decision of March 3, 2004, 1 BvF 3/92, BVerfGE 110, 33 (53); Judgment of July 27, 2005, 1 BvR 668/04, BVerfGE 113, 348 (376)
  5. ^ Paper / Möller: The Law of Determination and its Enforcement, AöR 122 (1997), 177 (184) and Sobota: The principle of the rule of law. Constitutional and administrative law aspects, Habil., Tübingen 1997, 497 (No. 64 and 62 aE)
  6. ↑ Federal Constitutional Court, judgment of July 26, 2005 - 1 BvR 782/94 u. a., paragraph 184 = BVerfGE 114, 1 (53) .
  7. ↑ Sachs, in: Sachs (ed.), Basic Law , Art. 20, margin no. 123 ff .; Sommermann, in: v. Mangoldt / Klein / Starck (eds.), Basic Law , Volume 2, 4th Edition 2000, Art. 20, margin no. 279 f .; Papier / Möller, The Law of Determination and Its Enforcement, AöR 122 (1997), 177 (179). Introducing the principle of clarity of norms Grefrath, The principle of clarity of norms in case processing, JA 2008, 710
  8. ↑ Law on constitutional general standards for the distribution of sales tax revenue, for financial equalization among the federal states and for the granting of additional federal allocations (measure law - measure Act) of 9 September 2001 (Federal Law Gazette I, p. 2302)