Recht, Staat, Freiheit

At the center of this classic collection of essays, which has been supplemented for this new edition by three additional treatises on questions of human dignity, are central questions of state order, as they can be seen in the existing, historically conditioned connection between freedom and law or freedom and the state. Böckenförde explains that law is not only a necessary condition of freedom, but at the same time presupposes the state as a unit of power and decision-making and holder of the monopoly of legitimate exercise of force. Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde is professor emeritus of public law, constitutional and legal history, and philosophy of law at the University of Freiburg and was a judge at the Federal Constitutional Court from 1983 to 1996.