Prof. Dr. Dres.
h.c. Winfried Hassemer is the Vice President of the
Bundesverfassungsgericht,
Germany's Federal Constitutional Court, a post he has held since April 2002.
Since passing the first
bar examination in 1964, Hassemer has held a variety of
academic and
administrative positions. From 1964-69, he was a
research assistant at the Institute for Legal and Social
Philosophy at the
Saarland University. In 1970, he moved to the
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in
Munich where he was a research assistant at the Institute for Legal Philosophy. He received his
Habilitation, entitling him to work as a
full professor, in
criminal law,
criminal procedure,
legal philosophy, and
legal sociology in 1970, and became a professor of
legal theory, legal sociology, criminal law, and criminal procedure at the
Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität at
Frankfurt.
From 1991-96, he was the official in charge or
privacy and
data protection matters for the
state of
Hessen. He was appoionted to the Federal Constitutional Court, second
Senat, in 1996.
His
dissertation dealt with the
hermeneutics of criminal law (
Tatbestand und Typus. Untersuchungen zur strafrechtlichen Hermeneutik). The work he authored for his
professorship concerned the sociology of crime. (
Theorie und Soziologie des Verbrechens. Ansätze zu einer praxisorientierten Rechtsgutslehre).
He has received two honorary
doctorates in law, one in 1998 from the University of
Thessaloniki, and the second in 2001 from the
Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro.