000			01853nam a22001577a 4500
999			_c522312 _d522312
008			230331b ||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
100			_aBomhoff, Jacco _939314
245			_aMaking legal knowledge work: Practising proportionality in the German repetitorium
260			_aSocial and Legal Studies
300			_a32(1), Feb, 2023: p.28-54
520			_aThis article presents a cultural and critical study of ‘proportionality review’ as a legal knowledge format and practice. The setting for this study is German public law, and in particular a domain of German legal education that is rarely analyzed even in Germany: the classes and materials offered by Repetitoren. These are commercial providers that aim to prepare students for the all-important ‘First Juridical Examination’. In this setting, proportionality is presented as a principle that matters, a doctrine that works, and a technique that jurists – lawyers, judges, but especially also law students – can learn to perform. Sustaining the sense that proportionality ‘works’, however, itself requires work, in particular in the form of largely invisible background constraints on what can count as suitable problems and appropriate solutions. In these processes of making proportionality into a ‘doable’ technical instrument, the German legal-constitutional order as a whole is presented as a feasible, achievable project. The article looks at how proportionality's success is produced and experienced, and at what its status as a foundational, near-ideal legal instrument means for the character of the German constitutional and legal imagination. – Reproduced
650			_aLegal knowledge, Legal technique, Cultural study of law, Germany, Constitutional rights. _937130
773			_aSocial and Legal Studies
906			_aCONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS
942			_cAR