The Bologna Process is a dramatic development that is less than ten years old, but already it has significantly reshaped higher education in Germany and in Europe. This article is based on my research regarding the history and objectives of the Bologna Process and Bologna Process implementation in Germany. It contains my reflections about the Bologna Process and German legal education and my recommendations to the German legal education community. In order to understand these reflections and recommendations, one needs a certain amount of background information about both the Bologna Process and German legal education. The sections that follow provide that background.

The issue of how democratic and constitutional nation states shall square international cooperation with their commitments to constitutionalism, democratic accountability and fundamental rights is a persistent problem that becomes ever more pressing with increasing international integration. The German Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) is well-known for having developed a detailed case law on the extent and forms of delegation of powers from the German state to inter-and supranational organizations.

The momentum behind the Constitutional Convention and the Constitutional Treaty was not that Brussels realised that the peoples of Europe were crying out for the drafting of a beautiful text, which they could take to their hearts as their very own constitution. That much, at least, has always been fairly clear. Of course, this should not present an impenetrable barrier to constitutional endeavour, because the constitutional possibility is the possibility that is generated by the effort of founding community in the honouring of community, honouring community in the recognition of community, recognising community in the identification of community, and identifying community in the founding of community. Every constitutional text is “guilty” of grasping and writing down its declarative commitment in this way. At two levels, then, the peculiarity of the European situation comes to light. First, this very fact that the people did not consider themselves part of a community that could be founded, honoured, recognised and identified through a constitutional register managed to become the crucial justifying motive for the production of a constitutional text. Secondly, and infinitely more significantly, this unspoken but widely-held belief in the constitutional impossibility becomes the register in which we seek to understand all the various positions and interests that emerge in the constitutional debate, and through which we seek to mandate those positions in the constitutional text.

Shocking news for police and intelligence agencies in Germany: the search for inland sleepers following the terrorist attacks in 2001 on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon was unconstitutional. Preventive data screening is incompatible with the fundamental right of informational self-determination according to Article 2 (I) in connection with Article 1 (I) of the Grundgesetz (GG - Basic Law). Since the ruling of the Bundesverfassungsgericht (BverfG - Federal Constitutional Court) of 4 April, 2006 (1 BvR 518/02), such numerous acquisition of data is not permitted unless a concrete threat to important objects of legal protection is existent.