Mourning for Professor Manfred Baldus

Manfred Baldus had been a professor at the University of Erfurt since 2003, where he held the chair of Public Law and Modern Legal History at the Faculty of Political Science. After studying law, political science and philosophy at the universities of Trier, Bonn, Paris and Berlin, he received his doctorate from the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main in 1994 with a thesis on "The Unity of the Legal Order - Meanings of a Legal Formula in Legal Theory, Civil and Constitutional Law in the 19th and 20th Centuries". Four years later, supported by a scholarship from the German Research Foundation (DFG), he completed his habilitation with a thesis on "Transnational Police Law - Constitutional Foundations and the Legal Formulation of Police Powers of Intervention in Cross-Border Matters". Manfred Baldus worked as an assistant, senior assistant, chair deputy and visiting professor at the universities of Rostock, Paris X, Hamburg (HSU), Frankfurt am Main and Kiel. He remained loyal to the University of Erfurt despite a call to the German Police University in Münster.

Professor Baldus' main areas of work were German constitutional law, legal theory, Thuringian state law and police law. He has worked particularly intensively on questions of human dignity and Article 1 of the German Basic Law. He has published extensively on the historical and theoretical foundations of law, state constitutional law, the law of internal and external security and state liability law. His profound review of the "struggles for human dignity" based on the debates since 1949 (Berlin: stw, 2016) found a large and positive resonance far beyond the specialist discourse. He presented a commentary on the constitution and the state law of the Free State of Thuringia and a study book, both of which were considered relevant after only a short time.

However, Professor Baldus' work was not limited to successful research and teaching across the considerable breadth of the subject area he represented: In 2008, he was first elected and appointed as a member of the Thuringian Constitutional Court. His term was renewed in 2012 for a further five years and in 2018 for a further seven years. As a constitutional court judge, Professor Baldus was also appointed as a rapporteur in particularly challenging hearings and was held in high regard across party lines, which was demonstrated not least by the overwhelmingly large vote of support during his last re-election.

With Manfred Baldus, the Faculty of Economics, Law and Social Sciences loses an excellent jurist and an opinionated personality who contributed significantly to the visibility of the University of Erfurt in the Free State of Thuringia and far beyond. We will honour the memory of our colleague.

Professor Walter Bauer-Wabnegg
(President of the University of Erfurt)

and

Professor Till Talaulicar
(Dean of the Faculty of Economics, Law and Social Sciences)