The Stakes of the Unwritten Constitutional Norms and Principles Debate in Germany

Focussing on “writtenness” can sharpen our sensibility of how liberally the German legal system allows the Federal Constitutional Court, as well as other courts, to acknowledge legal norms or principles whose textual basis in the Grundgesetz is far from obvious – which in other jurisdictions might be put into the area of norm-free, principle-oriented argumentation, i.e. whose constitutional quality is being problematized.