Natural Law Institute Presents Professor Robert Alexy, "The Ideal Dimension of Law"

Robert Alexy has been Professor of Public Law and Legal Philosophy at Christian Albrechts University, Kiel, since 1986. He was President of the German Section of the International Association for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy from 1994-1998.

Three of his seven books have been translated into English, each by a significant British or American scholar:

A Theory of Legal Argumentation trans. Neil MacCormick (Oxford: OUP 1989)

A Theory of Constitutional Rights trans. Julian Rivers (Oxford: OUP, 2002)

The Argument from Injustice: A Reply to Legal Positivism trans. Stanley Paulson and Bonnie L. Paulson (Oxford: OUP, 2002)

His most recent book is on the doctrine of legal foundations, and other books of his include one on the judgment of the German Constitutional Court on the conviction of border guards ordered to shoot people escaping over the Wall into West Germany. His theoretical and doctrinal contributions to the doctrine of proportionality have had a major impact on European and British law.

His legal theory can be said to take off from the hugely influential non-Catholic natural law theory of Gustav Radbruch, on which the German court relied in the border guards case.