Democracy, separation of powers and international treaty-making

Speaker: Professor Dr Gertrude Lübbe-Wolff (German Constitutional Court)
Chair: Professor Philippe Sands QC (University College London)
Admission: Free
Accreditation: This event is accredited with 1 CPD hour with the SRA and BSB
Series: Current Legal Problems 2015-16

About the lecture

Great parts of national legislation are nowadays produced in the form or under the direction of either supranational (EU) law or international treaties.

This lecture will explore how this affects the roles of parliament and of the executive in our national and supranational systems of separate powers, and whether in the present conditions, legal rules and practices of treaty-making at both national and supranational levels secure sufficient democratic control of legislative decision making.

Free trade agreements such as the currently negotiated TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) serve as examples.

About the speaker

Gertrude Lübbe-Wolff (b.1953) is Professor of Public Law at the University of Bielefeld and was Associate Justice of the Federal Constitutional Court (Second Senate) from 2002-2014.

She studied Law at the Universities of Bielefeld and Freiburg and at Harvard Law School (LL.M.).

From 1988-1992 she was Director of the Water Protection and General Environmental Matters Department of the municipal administration of Bielefeld.

Since 1992 she has been Professor of Public Law at the University Bielefeld.

She served as Chairperson of the German Council of Environmental Advisors from 2000-2002, as the Executive Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Bielefeld from 1996 to 2002, and was member of the board of various national academic and professional societies in the years 1994-2002.

Professor Lübbe-Wolff received the Leibniz Award granted by the German Research Foundation in 2000, the Hegel Prize of the City of Stuttgart in 2012, and an honoris causa doctoral degree from the European University Institute in 2015. She is an honorary bencher of Middle Temple Inn.

About Current Legal Problems

The Current Legal Problems annual lecture series was established over sixty years ago. The lectures are public, delivered on a weekly basis and chaired by members of the judiciary.

The Current Legal Problems (CLP) annual volume is published on behalf of UCL Laws by Oxford University Press, and features scholarly articles that offer a critical analysis of important current legal issues.

It covers all areas of legal scholarship and features a wide range of methodological approaches to law. With its emphasis on contemporary developments, CLP is a major point of reference for legal scholarship.

Find out more about CLP on the Oxford University Press website