Robert Alexy

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Robert Alexy in his office.

Robert Alexy (born September 9, 1945 in Oldenburg iO ) is a German lawyer and philosopher .

He has made a name for himself in German constitutional law and legal theory primarily through his distinction between rules and principles, inspired by Ronald Dworkin , and his contributions to the discourse theory of law influenced by Habermas . Internationally, Alexy has come first and foremost as a representative of a legal concept that includes moral principles on the basis of Radbruch's formula and as a critic of legal positivism .

Life

Alexy was born on September 9, 1945 in Oldenburg iO. His brother is the Bremen Chief Administrative Judge Hans Alexy . After graduating from high school, Alexy served in the German Armed Forces for three years, the last year as a lieutenant. In the summer semester of 1968 he began studying law and philosophy at the Georg-August University in Göttingen . His academic teachers were primarily Günther Patzig in philosophy and the legal philosopher Ralf Dreier in law. Since then, the works of Aristotle , Immanuel Kant and Gottlob Frege have formed the foundation of his philosophical and legal work. Among the legal philosophers, Hans Kelsen , HLA Hart , Gustav Radbruch and Alf Ross play a special role for Alexy.

After passing the first state law examination in 1973, Alexy worked on his dissertation, Theory of Legal Argumentation, until 1976 . In 1982 he received the prize of the Philological-Historical Class of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen for this study, which first appeared in print in 1978 . In 1976 he began his legal preparatory service, which he completed in 1978 with the second state examination in law. After that he was assistant to Ralf Dreier at the chair for general legal theory in Göttingen until 1984 . In 1984 he qualified as a professor at the Law Faculty of the University of Göttingen for the subjects of public law and legal philosophy. The subject of his habilitation thesis is Theory of Fundamental Rights .

Deputy professorships followed in Regensburg and Kiel. After rejecting a call to the University of Regensburg, he accepted the call to the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel in 1986 . In March 1991, he turned down an offer at the Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz as successor to Ota Weinberger . In the same year he was accepted into the Joachim Jungius Society of Sciences . From 1994 to 1998 he was President of the German Section of the International Association for Legal and Social Philosophy . In 1992 his book Concept and Validity of Law was published . In 1997 he was offered a position at the Georg-August University in Göttingen (successor to Ralf Dreiers), which he turned down in February 1998. Since 2002 he has been a full member of the Philological and Historical Class of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen.

Alexy retired at the end of September 2013. His farewell lecture took place on July 17, 2015. In 2019 the Christian-Albrechts-University appointed him senior professor .

plant

Alexy's legal and legal philosophical work is linguistically and systematically committed to the clarity postulate of analytical philosophy and essentially revolves around three main topics: the theoretical foundation and analysis of legal argumentation , the general structure of fundamental and human rights and the concept of law.

Theory of Legal Argumentation

The main thesis of his dissertation Theory of Legal Argumentation is that legal discourse should be viewed as a special case of general practical discourse. In the first part of the work Alexy presents various theories of practical discourse. Among other things, the linguistic-philosophical foundations of Wittgenstein and Austin and the consensus theory of truth by Habermas are discussed . In the second part of the thesis, Alexy uses the knowledge gained from this for legal methodology. Alexy postulates that when it comes to justifying a legal decision - at least notionally - a distinction must be made between internal and external justification. The internal justification corresponds to judicial syllogism, so it has a deductive structure. The condition for the internal justification is that at least one premise represents a universal norm, if possible a legal norm and it is a question of a set of premises free of contradictions. The justification of the premises of internal justification takes place in external justification.

Theory of Fundamental Rights

Following on from the distinction made by the American legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin between rules and principles, the main thesis of Alexy's habilitation thesis “Theory of Fundamental Rights” is that fundamental rights should be understood as principles. According to Alexy, principles are norms that dictate that something be implemented to the greatest possible extent relative to the legal and actual possibilities. Principles are optimization requirements. On the basis of this doctrine of principles, Alexy's law of balancing is to be understood, which plays a decisive role in the proportionality test of fundamental rights: "The higher the degree of non-fulfillment or impairment of one principle, the greater the importance of fulfilling the other must be." again the law of collision: "The conditions under which one principle takes precedence over the other form the facts of a rule that expresses the legal consequence of the preceding principle."

Concept and validity of law

In the book Concept and Validity of Law , Alexy professes non-positivism . He advocates the connection thesis, according to which the concept of law must be defined in such a way that it contains moral elements. Here, Alexy limits the moral requirements of the law to a minimum for reasons of conceptual clarity: for Alexy, therefore, are law

  1. the properly set,
  2. by and large socially effective and
  3. not extremely unfair norms in the sense of Radbruch's formula .

Alexy justifies the connection thesis with the correctness argument (see the following paragraph), the injustice argument (= argument in favor of the unbearable version of Radbruch's formula ) and the principle argument following on from Ronald Dworkin and Alexy's own theory of fundamental rights (necessary moral implications also from principles existing legal system).

The decisive role in Alexy's argument is played by the correctness argument . According to this, individual legal norms and individual legal decisions as well as legal systems as a whole make a conceptually necessary right to correctness. Systems of norms that do not make this claim explicitly or implicitly are not legal systems. For example, the first article of a constitution cannot read:

  • "X is a sovereign, federal and unjust republic."

Likewise, a judge should not pronounce a judgment of the following tenor:

  • "The accused is sentenced to life imprisonment, which is a wrong interpretation of the law."

The fictitious “constitutional article” cited above and the “judgment” quoted are, according to Alexy, logically flawed because they contain a performative contradiction . With the concept of performative contradiction, Alexy refers to ideas of the English philosopher John Langshaw Austin and to the prime example of a performatively contradicting statement created by him: “ The cat is on the mat, but I don't believe it is ” (“The cat lies on the mat, but I don't believe it ”). From the argument of correctness it follows that in every legal system that does not include performative contradictions there is a necessary connection between law and “some” form of morality. For Alexy, this shows a conceptually necessary connection between law and morality.

student

Alexy's students include Jan-Reinard Sieckmann ( Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg ), Matthias Klatt ( University of Graz ), Axel Tschentscher ( University of Bern ), Nils Jansen ( Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster ), Mattias Kumm (New York University School of Law, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin ), Martin Borowski ( Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg ), Jochen Bittner (Zeit-Editor), Fernando Leal ( Fundação Getulio Vargas , Rio de Janeiro), Virgilio Afonso da Silva ( University São Paulo ) and Carsten Bäcker ( University of Bayreuth ).

Awards

In 1982 Alexy received the prize of the Philological-Historical Class of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen for his dissertation Theory of Legal Argumentation, first published in 1978 .

In 2008 the Universities of Alicante ( Spain ), Buenos Aires ( Argentina ) and Tucumán (Argentina) awarded him an honorary doctorate. Further honorary doctorates followed in 2009 and 2010, awarded by the University of Antwerp , the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (Lima) and the Universidad Ricardo Palma (Lima). On June 14, 2012, the Universidade Federal do Piauí (Brazil) awarded him an honorary doctorate. On October 17, 2012, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Charles University in Prague . On October 31, 2012, the University of Coimbra awarded him an honorary doctorate. In the following years honorary doctorates from universities in Porto Alegre, Belo Horizonte, Chapecó, Rio de Janeiro and Bogotá followed . In 2016 Alexy was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Universidad Nacional del Altiplano , Peru . To date, he has received honorary doctorates twenty-one times.

On April 13, 2010 Alexy was awarded the Cross of Merit 1st Class of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. On June 30, 2013 Alexy was awarded the Kiel Science Prize.

Fonts

Robert Alexy's scientific work includes more than 180 publications that have been translated into more than a dozen languages. A complete list of his publications can be found on the website of his chair at Kiel University. His most important works include:

  • Theory of Legal Argumentation. The theory of rational discourse as a theory of legal justification , Frankfurt a. M. 1983 (first edition 1978)
  • Theory of Fundamental Rights , Frankfurt a. M. 1994 (first edition 1986) ISBN 3-518-28182-8
  • Concept and validity of law . Freiburg and Munich 1992, ISBN 3-495-48063-3 .
  • Wall shooters. On the relationship between law, morality and criminal liability . Hamburg 1993, ISBN 3-525-86282-2 .
  • Law, reason, discourse . Frankfurt a. M. 1995, ISBN 3-518-28767-2 .
  • The decision of the Federal Constitutional Court on the killings on the inner-German border of October 24, 1996 . Hamburg 1997, ISBN 3-525-86293-8 .
  • Robert Alexy, Hans-Joachim Koch, Lothar Kuhlen, Helmut Rüßmann: Elements of a legal justification theory . Baden-Baden 2003, ISBN 3-7890-8397-6 .

literature

  • Carsten Bäcker: Justification and Deciding: Criticism and Reconstruction of Alexy's Discourse Theory of Law . 2nd Edition. Nomos, Baden-Baden 2012, ISBN 978-3-8329-6630-0 .
  • Martin Borowski: Basic rights as principles . 2nd Edition. Nomos, Baden-Baden 2007, ISBN 978-3-8329-2625-0 .
  • Peter Gril: The possibility of practical knowledge from the perspective of discourse theory: An investigation into Jürgen Habermas and Robert Alexy . Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-428-09259-7 .
  • Matthias Klatt and Johannes Schmidt: Scope in Public Law: On the balancing theory of principles . Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2010, ISBN 978-3-16-150564-5 .
  • Matthias Klatt (Ed.): Institutionalized Reason. The Jurisprudence of Robert Alexy . Oxford University Press, Oxford 2010, ISBN 978-0-19-958206-8 .
  • George Pavlakos (Ed.): Law, Rights and Discourse: The Legal Philosophy of Robert Alexy . Hart, Oxford 2007, ISBN 978-1-84113-676-9 .
  • Jan-Reinard Sieckmann: rule models and principle models of the legal system . Baden-Baden 1990, ISBN 3-7890-1738-8 .
  • Jan-Reinard Sieckmann (ed.): The principle theory of basic rights: Studies on the basic rights theory Robert Alexys . Nomos, Baden-Baden 2007, ISBN 978-3-8329-2620-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Joachim Jungius Society of Sciences: Members. Retrieved March 26, 2017 .
  2. ↑ Personnel reports September 2013 of the CAU Kiel from October 7, 2013
  3. ↑ CAU Kiel press release No. 269/2015 of July 17, 2015
  4. ↑ CAU Kiel press release No. 222/2019 of July 10, 2019
  5. ↑ Prof. Dr. Axel Tschentscher, LL.M. August 31, 2016, accessed November 4, 2017 .
  6. ^ Personnel reports May 2009. In: Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel. June 11, 2010, accessed on January 16, 2012 (see: 4. Awards and honorary memberships ).
  7. ↑ UFPI concede título de Doutor Honoris Causa ao Prof. Dr. Robert Alexy. (No longer available online.) In: Universidade Federal do Piauí. June 14, 2012, archived from the original on July 22, 2015 ; Retrieved June 16, 2012 .
  8. ↑ http://www.cuni.cz/UK-4180.html
  9. ↑ https://www.uc.pt/sobrenos/DHC/RobertAlexy
  10. ↑ LA UNA DISTINGUE COMO DOCTOR HONORIS CAUSA A JURÍSTA ROBERT ALEXY | Universidad Nacional del Altiplano - UNAP - Puno. (No longer available online.) In: www.unap.edu.pe. Archived from the original on November 17, 2016 ; Retrieved November 17, 2016 .
  11. ↑ https://www.alexy.jura.uni-kiel.de/de/curriculum-vitae
  12. ↑ https://www.uni-kiel.de/pressemeldung/index.php?pmid=2010-066-alexy-verdienstkreuz
  13. ↑ http://www.kieler-woche.de/presse/_meldung.php?id=31232
  14. ↑ List of publications . In: Prof. Dr. Dr. hc mult. Robert Alexy . ( uni-kiel.de [accessed on February 17, 2017]).
personal data
SURNAME Alexy, Robert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer and philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH September 9, 1945
PLACE OF BIRTH Oldenburg (Oldenburg)