Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde: Scholar of Law, Religion, and Democracy

Abstract Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde (1930–2019) was one of Germany’s foremost postwar legal scholars. He coined or popularized key terms and ideas that have left their mark on postwar German political debate to an extent matched by only few, from the chain of legitimation to the concept of the constitution as an ordering frame, the importance of the idea of subsidiarity in the European Union’s political competency, and his insistence that society must continuously work toward agreement on the things that cannot be voted on: the ultimate agreements in society that lie beyond the ballot box. Böckenförde was a lifelong commentator on Catholic affairs in Germany and involved in several important inner-Catholic reform initiatives. At the age of thirty-one, he became known to a wider German public with an article that presented a critical historical appraisal of the role of the Catholic Church under National Socialism. While still a postdoc, he co-authored a widely publicized critique of Jesuit Gustav Gundlach’s justification on theological grounds of a war of nuclear deterrence. In 1968, he was the first to publish a German edition of De Libertate Religiosa, the final declaration of the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II), and provided an authoritative commentary.