Name: Anselm

Family Name: Rodenhausen

Affiliation: Articled clerk, Hanseatisches Oberlandesgericht (Higher Regional Court, Hamburg)

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Short BIO

Mag. jur. Anselm Rodenhausen is an articled clerk at the Higher Regional Court in Hamburg (Hanseatisches Oberlandesgericht). After finishing law school at the University of Constance, Germany in 2005, he worked for two years as a Junior Researcher at the Institute for Information, Telecommunications and Media Law (ITM), University of Münster. There he worked at the Legal Research Center of the DFN (Germany’s National Research and Education Network). His main research interests are multimedia-based aspects of competition law. As a Ph.D. student of Prof. Thomas Hoeren he wrote a doctoral thesis (submitted in 2008) about the regulation of crossmedia ownerships. From October 2007 till July 2008 he was a postgraduate student at the University of Oxford (Magdalen College, MJur programme).

Title of the presentation

The Strength of the German Constitution with regard to Technological Developments

Abstract

In this short presentation I will attempt to explain why the German Constitutional System offers full and adequate protection of fundamental rights with respect to the changing circumstances in the digital era of the 21st century. According to my hypothesis, this is due to the flexible system of the constitutional text (Basic Law) itself as well as to the jurisprudence by the Federal Constitutional Court.

First, I will show how the system of protection is set up in the text of the Basic Law; this includes the different liberties guaranteed in articles 1 to 19, the function of these rights, and their enforcement. Second, I will have a closer look at some fundamental rights that are codified in full detail by the text, such as article 13 (inviolability of the home) or article 10 (secrecy of communications), and present how the Federal Constitutional Court adopted these rights to new technologies. Finally, I will analyse how the Court used catch-all elements to grant constitutional protection also to areas that are not explicitly mentioned in the wording of the Basic Law, such as privacy or data protection.

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