In her time as a judge of the Federal Constitutional Court, the Bielefeld constitutional law teacher Gertrude Lübbe-Wolff was known not least for her cutting, intellectual superiority-claiming dissenting opinions and thus for cultivating a form that indicated that the court’s internal search for consensus had reached a limit . After retiring in 2014, she has turned to the question of how advising on decisions can support constitutional courts in avoiding polarization and creating constitutional common ground as a researcher drawing from practice. The result is a study that can be described as monumental, which (for whatever reason) is generally accessible on the Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation’s website and was only distributed in a small edition as a book by the foundation.
Anyone who believes that this form of publication is intended to indicate that things are provisional or even incomplete will see themselves taught better after reading it. On the contrary, Lübbe-Wolff wrote a book that is remarkably well-argued for its scope, even if it is not consistently reader-friendly, and that points new paths to the legal investigation of constitutional jurisdiction. One of these paths lies in the radical globalism of the work, in which Lübbe-Wolff uses examples from constitutional systems from all parts of the world – from France to Myanmar, from Peru to Indonesia, Tajikistan, Italy, Finland and Senegal.