Ernst-Wolfgang B ckenf rde (b. 1930) is one of Europe's foremost legal scholars and political thinkers. As a scholar of constitutional law and a judge on Germany's Federal Constitutional Court (December 1983 - May 1996), B ckenf rde has been a major contributor to contemporary debates in legal and political theory, to the conceptual framework of the modern state and its presuppositions, and to contested political and ethical problems. Thus, his writings...