Registrieren

While the proportionality principle has long stood as a hallmark of German legal scholarship and a widely adopted framework for adjudicating conflicts between individual rights and collective interests, its first sub-test, legitimacy review, i.e. the requirement that state action pursue a legitimate aim, remains strikingly underdeveloped in both doctrine and theory. Courts and scholars alike tend to treat this stage as a largely formal or perfunctory inquiry, with substantive evaluation deferred to the later stages of analysis. A comparative survey of national and supranational practice, including that of the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany, the Supreme Courts of Canada and Israel, the Constitutional Court of the Republic of South Africa, and the European Court of Human Rights, bears out this diagnosis.