(Criminal) law and time in the climate crisis

Lecture and panel discussion

Welcome
Prof. Franziska Nori (Director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein)
Prof. Dr. Rainer Forst (Director of the Research Centre “Normative Orders”, Goethe University Frankfurt)
Finn-Lauritz Schmidt (Research Center “Normative Orders”, Goethe University Frankfurt)

Lecture
Prof. Dr. Klaus Günther (Research Centre “Normative Orders”, Goethe University Frankfurt)

Followed by a panel discussion with
Prof. Dr. Klaus Günther (Research Centre “Normative Orders”, Goethe University Frankfurt)
Prof. Dr. Gabriele Britz (former judge of the Federal Constitutional Court, legal scholar at Justus Liebig University Giessen)
Prof. Dr. Christoph Burchard (Research Centre “Normative Orders”, Goethe University Frankfurt)
Moderation: Rebecca Caroline Schmidt (Managing Director of the Research Centre “Normative Orders”, Goethe University Frankfurt)

The Federal Constitutional Court introduces the term “intertemporal safeguarding of freedom” at a central point in the grounds of its 2021 climate decision. According to the explanatory statement, the Basic Law also requires the “safeguarding of freedom protected by fundamental rights over time” and “the proportionate distribution of opportunities for freedom across generations”. Beyond the directly constitutionally relevant issues, the new key concept opens up a dimension of freedom that has received insufficient attention to date, but which will play an increasingly important role in the future in view of the accelerating climate crisis: The temporality of freedom. The law has so far hardly adequately grasped this dimension, and the relationship between law and time is rarely addressed in legal scholarship. The lecture will present some reflections on this, particularly with regard to the problem of the urgent and increasingly scarce time that is at the heart of concerns about the climate.

Prof. Dr. Klaus Günther is Professor of Legal Theory, Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure Law at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. He studied philosophy and law in Frankfurt am Main. Between 1983 and 1986, he was a research assistant and university assistant in Frankfurt am Main with Klaus Lüderssen and in a legal theory working group under the direction of Jürgen Habermas (1986-1990); he received his doctorate in 1987 with a dissertation on the subject of “Application Discourses in Morality and Law”, followed by his habilitation in 1997 (title of the habilitation thesis: “Guilt and Communicative Freedom. Studien zur individuellen Zurechnung strafbaren Unrechts im Demokratischen Rechtsstaat”). Since 1998, he has been Professor of Legal Theory, Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure Law at the Institute for Criminal Science and Philosophy of Law at Goethe University. He is a member of the “Research Center for Normative Orders” there as well as at the Frankfurt location of the “Research Institute for Social Cohesion”.

Prof. Dr. Gabriele Britz is Professor of Public Law and European Law at Justus Liebig University Giessen.
Britz studied law at the University of Frankfurt/M. from 1987. In 1994, she received her doctorate for her thesis “The significance of European Community law for local energy supply with special consideration of municipal options”, for which she was awarded the Baker & McKenzie Prize. After completing her legal clerkship, she researched from 1997 to 2000 as a habilitation fellow of the state of Hesse and wrote “Kulturelle Rechte und Verfassung. On the legal treatment of cultural difference”. In 2000, she completed her habilitation in Frankfurt. In 2001, she was awarded the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize 2001 by the German Research Foundation. From 2011 to 2023, she was a judge at the Federal Constitutional Court. During her term of office, she prepared central decisions of the Federal Constitutional Court in the areas of environmental, family and data protection law as a rapporteur.

Prof. Dr. Christoph Burchard is Professor of Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure, International and European Criminal Law, Comparative Law and Legal Theory at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main.
In 2007, he received his doctorate from the University of Passau with the thesis: “Irren ist menschlich” – Vorsatz und Tatbestandsirrtum im Lichte der Verantwortungsethik und der Emanzipation des angegriffenen Mitmenschen. In 2015, he habilitated at the LMU Munich (title of habilitation thesis: The constitutionalization of mutual recognition. Judicial cooperation in criminal matters in Europe in the light of Union constitutional law).
Since 2015, he has held a professorship for criminal law and criminal procedure at the Faculty of Law at Goethe University Frankfurt and is a member of the research center “Normative Orders”. He conducts research on the transformations of criminal law and criminal justice in changing societies in the course of their internationalization, Europeanization and digitalization as well as “glocal” polycrises. He has been a visiting professor at various universities in Europe (including Luiss University Rome, University of Bologna) and in South America (University Adolfo Ibáñez, Santiago de Chile). He is also the founding spokesperson of the Center for Critical Computational Studies (C3S), which was established in 2023.