Ernst Friesenhahn (1901-1984)

The work presents a legal biography of the former Federal Constitutional Court justice Ernst Friesenhahn, offering for the first time a comprehensive assessment of his life and work. To this end, the study evaluates, among other sources, Friesenhahn's papers held in the Federal Archives in Koblenz as well as case files of the Federal Constitutional Court relating to proceedings in which Friesenhahn participated during his tenure from 1951 to 1963. This reveals the portrait of a constitutional lawyer who - having earned his doctorate under Carl Schmitt in 1928 and later breaking with him - emerged from the National Socialist period largely unscathed as a devout Catholic. Friesenhahn belongs to those figures who exerted considerable influence on the development of German constitutional law scholarship in the postwar era - especially in the field of constitutional procedural law - and who helped ensure that the prominent goal of establishing a rule-of-law state, as enshrined in the Basic Law, did not remain an empty promise. He advocated a form of legal positivism that was neither sterile nor ahistorical, but consistently oriented toward reality and practical life. At the Federal Constitutional Court, in his role as a "professor-judge," he ensured that the judgments of the Second Senate were coherent and rigorously reasoned. He played a key role in major cases of the Adenauer era, such as those concerning the European Defence Community Treaty, the Reich Concordat, and the "Deutschland-Fernsehen" case. As President of the German Jurists' Conference (1962-1966) and as Chairman of the Association of German Constitutional Law Teachers (1968 and 1969), he shaped constitutional law debates in the Federal Republic and, drawing on his own life experiences, credibly advocated for confronting the injustices of the National Socialist regime. As a co-founder of the Institute for Church-State Law of the Dioceses of Germany, he earned lasting merit in this field of law.