Faculty & Administration View All
Donald P. Kommers
Joseph and Elizabeth Robbie Professor of Political Science and Professor of Law
Office Number: 1114 Flanner Hall
Telephone: 574.631.6304
Fax: 574.631.4197
Email: Donald.P.Kommers.1@nd.edu
Staff Assistant: Rebecca Ward
Donald P. Kommers has been a member of the faculty of the University of Notre Dame since 1963, serving in the Department of Political Science, where he has been a chaired professor since 1992. He joined the faculty of the Notre Dame Law School in 1975, becoming the second director of the University’s Center for Civil and Human Rights. Professor Kommers’ publications include 10 books, 23 major book chapters, and 67 articles, mainly in the areas of public law – American, German, and comparative – and German politics. His next book, Red, Black, and Gold: Germany’s Constitutional Odyssey, will be published in 2009. He teaches primarily in the area of constitutional law, both American and comparative. He earned his B.A. in philosophy and English literature at the Catholic University of America and his advanced degrees (M.A. and Ph.D.) in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also studied law. In 1998, he received an honorary doctor of laws degree from Germany’s Heidelberg University. He was the fourth American to be so honored by Heidelberg’s law faculty since 1949. On May 13, 2007, St. Norbert College in DePere, Wisconsin awarded him another honorary doctor of laws degree. He also delivered the commencement address to the graduating class of 2007.
Professor Kommers has held many prestigious positions and fellowships in the United States and abroad. He has been a resident scholar in Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court, an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow on the law faculty of Cologne University (Germany), a Max Planck Society Fellow in the Max Planck Institute of International and Comparative Public Law in Heidelberg, a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Tokyo in Japan, and the winner of the Alexander von Humboldt Prize for senior U.S. scholars, an award that allowed him to spend yet another year in Germany working on projects of his own choosing. His other honors include major grants and senior fellowships from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the German Marshall Fund of the United States. For two years (1980-82), he served as an advisor to President Carter’s Commission on the Holocaust. In 1991, he was co-winner of the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award for an article on privacy published in The World and I (September 1990). In 2008, he won the Berlin Prize, a coveted award that will permit him to spend a residential fellowship at the American Academy of Berlin (Germany) where he expects to finish a major project on Germany’s constitutional culture.
Professor Kommers is active in a number of professional organizations, including the American Political Science Association and the American Bar Association. In addition, he has served as president of the National Conference Group on German Politics from 1994 to 1996. In 1997, he was named to the advisory board of the newly founded American Association of Constitutional Law. He also served as editor of The Review of Politics from 1981 to 1994, and is currently a member of the editorial advisory boards of the American Journal of Jurisprudence and American Journal of Comparative Law. In 2001, he was named to the editorial advisory board of the new International Journal of Comparative Constitutional Law published by the New York University School of Law.
In the News
- What distinguishes Germany’s Basic Law from the United States Constitution? Published in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, FAZ.NET (May 18, 2009)
- Prof. Donald Kommers Wins Major Fellowship – NDLS Home Page – February 11, 2008
About The Robbie Chair
The Joseph and Elizabeth Robbie Chair in Government and International Studies, established in 1976, is the gift of Joseph Robbie in memory of his son, Dr. David L. Robbie, a 1966 cum laude graduate of the University who died in 1976. A native of South Dakota, Mr. Robbie practiced law early in his career in his home state before moving to Minneapolis in 1953, where he became active in urban governmental planning. In 1965, he founded the Miami Dolphins franchise of the National Football League and engaged in numerous Dade County, Florida, civic, charitable and political activities. He also served on the Advisory Council for the University’s College of Arts and Letters. Joseph Robbie died in 1990, and his wife Elizabeth died in 1991.
LAW73449, Comparative Constitutional Law
Faculty Expertise Areas
- Comparative constitutional law
- Constitutional law
- Human rights law
- Law and religion
Selected Books
American Constitutional Law: Essays, Cases, and Comparative Notes, 3rd ed. (Rowman and Littlefield, 2010) with John Finn and Gary Jacobsohn.
The Constitutional Jurisprudence of the Federal Republic of Germany (Duke University Press, 1997).
The Federal Constitutional Court (American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, Johns Hopkins University, 1994).
Germany and its Basic Law, edited with Paul Kirchoff (Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1994).
Human Rights and American Foreign Policy, edited with Gilbert Loescher (University of Notre Dame Press, 1979).
Judicial Politics in West Germany: A Study of the Federal Constitutional Court (Sage Publications, 1976).
The Governments of Germany, with Arnold J. Heidenheimer (Crowell, 1975).
Recent Essays
Das Bundesverfassungsgericht: Procedure, Practice and Policy of the German Federal Constitutional Court, 3 JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE LAW 194-211 (with Russell Miller) (2008).
Germany: Balancing Rights and Duties, in Interpreting Constitutions: A Comparative Study, (Jeffrey Goldsworthy ed., 2006): 161-214.
American Courts and Democracy: A Comparative Perspective, in The Judicial Branch (Kermit L. Hall & Kevin T. McGuire eds., 2005) 200-230.
Comparative Constitutional Law: Its Increasing Relevance in Defining the Field of Comparative Constitutional Law (Praeger, 2002): 61-70.
Die freie Meinungsäußerung in der Rechstprechung des Bundesverfassungsgerichts und des Supreme Court: Ein Vergleich in Verfassungswirklichkeit (Springer-Verlag, 2002): 1-30.
The Basic Law: A Fifty-Year Assessment, 53 Southern Methodist University Law Review 447-492 (2000).
Autonomy Versus Accountability: The German Judiciary in Judicial Independence in Comparative Perspective (University of Virginia Press, 2001): 131-154.
The Constitutionalism of Mary Ann Glendon, 73 Notre Dame Law Review 1333-1354 (1998).
_Transitional Justice in East Germany, _22 Law and Social Inquiry 829 (1997).
The Constitutional Law of Abortion in Germany: Should Americans Pay Attention?, 10 Journal of Contemporary Health Law and Policy 1-32 (1994). (This article based on the author’s Brendan Brown Lecture delivered in the Law School of The Catholic University of America.)
