Michael Stolleis Libri

This history of the discipline of public law in Germany covers three dramatic decades of the Twentieth century. It opens with the First World War, analyses the highly creative years of the Weimar Republic, and recounts the decline of German public law that began in 1933 and extended to the downfall of the Third Reich.

Michael Stolleis is part of a younger generation and is determined to honestly confront the past in hopes of preventing the same injustices from happening in the future.

Exploring the symbolism of law's authority, the first essay traces the evolution of the metaphor of the "Eye of the Law" from ancient Greece to contemporary society, highlighting figures like the impartial judge and the omniscient Eye of God. The second essay examines the legitimizing phrases used by courts throughout history, emphasizing how authority is derived from higher powers, such as divine or state entities. Together, these essays reveal the persistent belief in law's supremacy, even as faith in its infallibility wanes.

This work brings together historians and philosophers to explore legal interpretation in the 18th century, highlighting the contrast between Enlightenment ideology and the reality of diverse legal sources. It examines the necessity of interpretation to unify norms in law and the role of reason in this process.

German public law has been taught in universities since the early 17th century and continues to this day to be a dominant subject in German legal culture, especially in its modern incarnations of constitutional and administrative law, and European and international law. Michael Stolleis's Public Law in Germany: A Historical Introduction from the 16th to the 21st Century, expertly translated by Thomas Dunlap, provides an account of the fundamental developments in public law that situates current debates in the German Federal Constitutional Court as well as the role of the nation-state in Europe more broadly. It further examines the role of fundamental rights through the lens of Germany's special administrative courts and discusses their important role in the advancement of German law. Written with students in mind, the book distils Stolleis's masterful four-volume History of Public Law in Germany, the third volume of which (1914-1945) was published by Oxford University Press in 2004. It is an invaluable companion to the understanding of German public law more generally.

The sole available comprehensive history of social law and the model of social welfare in Germany. The book explains the origins since the medieval times, but concentrates on the 19th and 20th centuries, especially on the introduction of the social insurance 1881-1889, of the expansion of the system in the Weimar Republic, under the Nazi-System and after World War II in the FRG and the GDR. The system of social welfare in Germany is one of the pillars of economic stability.

This book traces the origins of the German welfare state. The author, formerly director at the Max-Planck-Institute for European Legal History, Frankfurt, provides a perceptive overview of the history of social security and social welfare in Germany from early modern times to the end of World War II, including Bismarck’s pioneering introduction of social insurance in the 1880s. The author unravels “layers” of social security that have piled up in the course of history and, so he argues, still linger in the present-day welfare state. The account begins with the first efforts by public authorities to regulate poverty and then proceeds to the “social question” that arose during the 19th-century Industrial Revolution. World War I had a major impact on the development of social security, both during the war and after, through the exigencies of the war economy, inflation and unemployment. The ruptures as well as the continuities of social policy under National Socialism and World War II are also investigated.

Im Kontext von »Globalisierung« und der damit eng verknüpften Transformation des klassischen Nationalstaats wird vermehrt über »Dezentralisierung« als Antwort auf die Herausforderung des epochalen Wandels debattiert. Den auf globale Vernetzung drängenden Kräften stehen solche entgegen, die gerade in den expansiven Prozessen das Hauptübel sehen, das man zwar nicht verhindern, aber abmildern kann. Der multidisziplinäre Band, der aus einer Initiative geisteswissenschaftlich orientierter Max-Planck-Institute hervorgegangen ist, will dazu beitragen, die »Früchte« der unterschiedlichen Strategien auch empirisch verlässlicher zu bestimmen. Das ist das Feld der Soziologie, der Politologie und der Wirtschaftswissenschaft. Speziell die historischen Fächer können klären, wie es zu den unterschiedlichen Traditionen und Mentalitäten gekommen ist und wo die Ursachen der Konflikte liegen. Die juristischen Disziplinen schließlich haben zu prüfen, welche normativen Regime sich empfehlen, und wie sich dezentrale Modelle finden lassen, welche die Ziele der effizienten Demokratie, der Menschen- und Bürgerrechte und der Selbstverantwortung in der Globalisierungszeit tatsächlich gewährleisten helfen.