Main Content

Research foci of the chair

Main topics

Professor Horn’s dissertation Experimentelle Gesetzgebung unter dem Grundgesetz [Experimental Legislation under the Basic Law] (1989) takes the practice of experimental legislation, which emerged with the development of telecommunications in the 1980s, as an opportunity to subject this form of codification to a fundamental constitutional and legislative-theoretical appraisal.

His habilitation thesis Die grundrechtsunmittelbare Verwaltung [Administration Direct to Fundamental Rights] (1999) undertakes an advance towards a new understanding of the state’s separation and distribution of powers. The constitutional principle is reconstructed under the conditions of the democratic constitutional state as a principle that simultaneously organizes the democratic and the constitutional legitimacy of state action. This is demonstrated by the double binding of public administration to law and constitution.

Further basic research in state and constitutional (legal) theory and dogmatics is devoted to, among other things the state’s monopoly on the use of force; the relationship between state and society; the principle of separation of powers; the republican principle; the position of professional and industry associations in the constitutional state; the principle of democracy and the forms of direct democracy; the right to vote and to scrutinize elections; the function of the democratic public sphere; the parliamentary system of government; the constitutional law of dealing with the past; the right to privacy; the statutory judge; the interconnections among national, European, and international law; and the constitutional requirements and limits of European integration.

Furthermore, Professor Horn deals with individual questions of general administrative law and administrative procedural law, security and police law, building and regional planning law, higher education law, national and international public economic law, and economic and monetary union.
As one of the litigators, he conducted the proceedings before the German Federal Constitutional Court and the European Court of Justice concerning the Public Sector Purchase Program (PSPP) of the European Central Bank (Judgment of the Federal Constitutional Court of 5 May 2020).   

Furthermore, he represents the constitutional complaint before the German Federal Constitutional Court against the Own Resources Ratification Act, which contains Germany’s consent to the indebtedness of the European Union over the course of the post-coronavirus rebuilding plan called “Next Generation EU.”

International issues

On the basis of existing cooperation agreements or university partnership agreements, Professor Horn promotes international cooperation in teaching and research (student and faculty exchanges, scientific symposia and projects), especially with the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University Kaliningrad IKBFU (formerly Königsberg in East Prussia) and the Moscow State Institute of International Relations MGIMO in the Russian Federation as well as with the University of Wuhan and the University of Finance and Economics of Nanjing in the People’s Republic of China.

The university partnership with IKBFU Kaliningrad, which has been in place for more than two decades, includes: the organization and scholarly management of comparative law seminars and a biennial, three-week summer university program in European and international Law, funded by the DAAD and the Petersburg Dialogue; the supervision and third-party funding of semesters abroad, Master’s studies, and library research stays by Kaliningrad post-graduates and lecturers at Philipps-Universität Marburg; the conception and expansion of the study module “Russian and Eurasian Legal Studies – REALs” for foreigners at the Law Institute of the IKBFU; as well as – in cooperation with the Jean Monnet Institute at the MGIMO University in Moscow – participation in the bilateral establishment of an international law-oriented Kantiana Law Academy at IKBFU Kaliningrad.