Blankenagel's Farewell Lecture on German Constitutional Identity

April 29, 2019

On April 19, 2019 Professor Alexander Blankenagel (Humboldt University, Faculty of Law) returned to CEU to deliver a distinguished public lecture to mark his more than two decades of service to the University.

The public lecture traced the development of the doctrine of constitutional identity in the jurisprudence of the German Constitutional Court from the famous Solange I judgment to its most recent iterations. Following a discussion of the case law, the lecture explored veiled instances wherein the Constitutional Court ventured into discussing not constitutional, but collective identity. The talk provided insight into fashions in constitutional jurisprudence and the limited extent to which constitutional law scholarship is willing to engage with the humanities and social science literature on the invention of the shaping and transformation of identity narratives.

Alexander Blankenagel is emeritus professor at Humboldt University, Faculty of Law. Between 1992 and 2017 he served as a recurrent visiting professor at the Department of Legal Studies.

Over these years, Professor Blankenagel had taught German and Russian constitutional law. His teaching covered lessons from constitutional transitions, including both the transition to constitutional democracy and the demise of the rule of law. In addition to his courses, Professor Blankenagel participated in several projects aimed at supporting the reform of legal education in Russia. These projects included expert advice for the development of the first comparative constitutional law case book created by Russian authors, as well as a training project for young professors of constitutional law (funded by HESP ReSET). The constitutional law moot court competition that sprang from the latter project is still regularly organized by the Institute of Law and Public Policy.

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