The Leibniz lecture was delivered by Prof. Christoph Mollers at the National Law University Delhi, Tuesday, 15 October 2019. Christoph Mollers, Dr. jur. (Munich), LL.M. (Chicago) is a Professor of Public Law and Jurisprudence, Faculty of Law, Humboldt-University Berlin, and a Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize Holder. He was a Fellow at NYU School of Law and at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, and was a judge at the Superior Administrative Court in Berlin.
His lecture’s title was Constitutional Review In Authoritarian Times: It talked about how in the authoritarian times, constitutional courts seem to be the last institution standing to secure the protection of rights and the integrity of the legal order. Yet, as courts are also part of the political system, they cannot be completely immunized from general majoritarian trends. If constitutional standards erode, constitutional and other courts may simply follow. In the lecture it was analysed that institutional mechanisms will certainly not stop, but may slow down and mitigate the institutional decline of courts in authoritarian or semi-authoritarian political environments. The lecture started with general reflections on the relation between the political system and legal institutions, and the argument proceeded to more concrete questions of the organization and procedure of constitutional review by assessing examples from Asian, European, and American constitutional orders.
The lecture was attended by Vice-Chancellor, NLUD; faculty, researchers and LL.M. students of NLUD; several academicians; and others. The dais was graced by Prof. M. P. Singh, Prof. Christoph Mollers, and Dr. Matthias Kiesselbach, Director of German Research Foundation, India.