From left: Anna Gamper, President of the State Court Hilmar Hoch, Rector Veronika Sexl, President of the Constitutional Court Christoph Grabenwarter and Peter Bußjäger.
September 25, 2023
On September 21, 2023, Anna Gamper and Peter Bußjäger (both Institute of Public Law, State and Administrative Studies) organized the symposium “Constitutional Court Reasoning”, which addressed reasoning as an essential structural element of constitutional court decisions which explains the verdict from a theoretical and comparative perspective.
The opening lecture of the conference “The Reasons of the Constitutional Court” was given by the Austrian judge of the European Court of Justice, Andreas Kumin, whose presentation dealt with the reasons given by the European Court of Justice.
In the following lectures, the results of a worldwide statistical comparison of the structures, content and stylistic features of the reasons of the selected constitutional courts were presented. Key themes that were also discussed were cultures of deliberation as an essential factor in the reasoning cultures of constitutional courts, as well as forms of dialectics that arise from special opinions and deviations from previous jurisprudence.
Three speakers, including the President of the State Court of Liechtenstein, Hilmar Hoch, dealt in a comparative legal way with the justification styles of the Austrian Constitutional Court, the State Court of Liechtenstein and the Swiss Federal Court, among which there were similarities, but also Significant differences. .
The impressive closing speech by the President of the Austrian Constitutional Court, Christoph Grabenwarter, was dedicated to the link between constitutional reasons, the rule of law and democracy.