Few Americans have heard of either Karlsruhe or its courts, the Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitutional Court) and the Bundesgerichtshof (Federal Court of Justice). Moreover, American lawyers who walk through the unique, Enlightenment-era city center of Germany's seat of justice may be surprised. Karlsruhe's streets are neither the twisting, medieval alleyways of travel brochures that extol Europe's charms nor the grand, straight avenues of Berlin. They are evenly spaced spokes of a rational planner's superimposed wheel. When American lawyers approach the Federal Constitutional Court (FCC), they find a further surprise: The court inhabits a modest, modern building. This unimposing structure is stunningly different from the U.S. Supreme Courts massive marble temple on Washington's unmistakably imperial Capitol Hill. The German court sits quietly, unobtrusively between gardens and lawns around a palace that long ago ceased to be a center of political power. Except for the handful of armed guards, one could easily mistake the court for an ordinary office building or part of the local university.

If social and political stability in a democratic state requires effective constitutional review, the brutal instability of German society over the first half of the 20th Century testifies to the shortcomings of earlier manifestations of German constitutionalism and the mechanisms for constitutional review upon which those constitutional systems relied. By the same standard, however, the stability and prosperity West Germany enjoyed (and has continued to enjoy since October 1990, as a reunified Germany) over the last half of the 20th Century bespeaks the integrity and efficacy of the Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitutional Court), the unique constitutional organ celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.

It's a small book. Actually, it is a very small book. Only one hundred and twenty-eight pages, it's a format so thin it could fit into a pocket. As a matter of fact, it is smaller than a copy of the Grundgesetz (German Basic Law) that a German law student would carry along to class. The book's title, however, is considerably more intrepid than the book's small stature. At the same time breathtakingly pithy and slightly immodest, the book is simply called Das Bundesverfassungsgericht (The Federal Constitutional Court). And at the top of the cover, just to make sure, the word “WISSEN” (KNOWLEDGE) appears in big letters. While one wonders how a publication of such limited size could deign to comprehensively present the important “knowledge” of the Federal Constitutional Court, the other words on the cover provide some assurance. Those words are the name of the book's author who obviously could not be more adequate for the task. The author, Jutta Limbach, is the current President of the Federal Constitutional Court presiding in her seventh year.

It has been a long journey from the noble declaration in the Federal Republic's new constitution (Grundgesetz [Basic Law]) that women and men have equal rights, to the establishment of concrete laws and jurisprudence that now assure that women and men actually receive equal treatment and that women are no longer disadvantaged in society (and even more, laws and jurisprudence that assure that women receive support if they encounter structural disadvantages). This article, in looking back on its first fifty years of service, surveys the decisive role that the Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitutional Court) played in that journey.

In this exclusive interview with Federal Constitutional Court Justice, Professor Udo Di Fabio, GLJ looks forward to some of the challenges the Court will face in next fifty years, especially the meaning for the Court of domestic (privatization) and international (europeanization) changes to the role of the nation state. The interview begins with an exploration of the nature and role of the Federal Constitutional Court in light of radical changes in the law as well as the social sciences. Justice Di Fabio also addresses the Court's narrow role as an interpreter of legal texts, noting that the Court performs this function while also exercising broader, quasi-legislative authority within a pluralistic and post-traditional society. The interview then turns to questions related to the role of the state and the traditional public structuring of societal authority as set against the general turn to societal self-structuring, especially in the context of the debate over the nature of the European Union's authority.