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Democracy and Human Dignity: Limits of a Moralized Conception of Rights in German Constitutional Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 March 2012

Christoph Möllers
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Abstract

The Parliamentary Council, the constitutional assembly for the German Basic Law, split over the question whether the guarantee of human dignity should be understood as the result of a democratic decision or as the incorporation of a pre-existing universal principle of Christian origin. The subsequent constitutional practice was dominated by a moral understanding of the norm that stressed the contradiction between democracy and human dignity. This Article rejects this interpretation and attempts to show, using the exemplary German case, that a democracy-oriented interpretation of human dignity is not necessarily less effective than a moralized understanding.

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Articles
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Israel Law Review , Volume 42 , Issue 2 , 2009 , pp. 416 - 439
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press and The Faculty of Law, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 2009

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References

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