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The Federal Constitutional Court: Fifty Years of the Struggle for Gender Equality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2019

Renate Jaeger

Extract

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It has been a long journey from the noble declaration in the Federal Republic's new constitution (Grundgesetz [Basic Law]) that women and men have equal rights, to the establishment of concrete laws and jurisprudence that now assure that women and men actually receive equal treatment and that women are no longer disadvantaged in society (and even more, laws and jurisprudence that assure that women receive support if they encounter structural disadvantages). This article, in looking back on its first fifty years of service, surveys the decisive role that the Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitutional Court) played in that journey.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
German Law Journal , Volume 2 , Issue 9: Special issue — Fifty Years of the Bundesverfassungsgericht , 2001 , E5
Copyright
Copyright © 2001 by German Law Journal GbR 

References

This article was originally published, in German, in the German magazine Emma: Renate Jeager, “Wie das Grundgesetz in unsere Gesetze kam,” EMMA, July/August 1999, at 82. Subtle differences between the article as it appears here and the original are a result of the translation into the English language and the editors' efforts to harmonize the article with the theme of this special issue of the German Law Journal.Google Scholar
Elisabeth Selbert and three other women participated as representatives in the Parliamentary Council that met in Bonn in September 1948 to draft the Federal Republic's (West Germany) new Constitution, called the Basic Law. She featured prominently in the inclusion of a gender equality clause (as paragraph 2) in Article 3 of the Basic Law, which read (until its amendment in 1994) as follows: “Men and women shall have equal rights.”Google Scholar
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This shift coincided with the election in 1977 of Gisela Niemeyer as the first female Justice of the Federal Constitutional Court.Google Scholar
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