Personal Background:
I was born and grew up in the beautiful village of Brücken, Germany, which is situated in the Bundesland (state) of Rhineland-Palatinate and there in the western Palatinate region close to the border of another German Land (state), the Saarland, and not very far - even by European standards - from the French border. The next bigger city and indeed one known to football fans worldwide is Kaiserslautern, home of the 1. FCKaiserslautern and venue of two games of the Socceroos during the last world cup (against Japan and Italy).
Before I came to Armidale, my family and I lived in Saarbrücken, Germany. Saarbrücken is the the state capital of the Saarland, the smallest non-city state of Germany and arguably the state in Germany that enjoys the best quality of living, second perhaps only to that of the Palatinate region. Albeit being an old industrial state (coal and steel industry) the economic base of the state has now shifted largely to the automotive industry (the Ford Motor Company operates a big plant in the state), information technology and services. Much is directly or indirectly fueled by Saarland University with its main campus in Saarbrücken and its impressive Medical School and University Hospital campus about 30 km outside of Saarbrücken in the city of Homburg/Saar.
Before joining UNE Law School I worked at the Europa-Institute of Saarland University, a branch of the Faculty of Law and Economics. The Institute has a law and a business department, as does the the Faculty, so for all practical purposes it is a part of the law school. I came to Saarbrücken in 1989 to do the practical part of my legal training after having graduated from the University of Mannheim’s School of Law. I also enrolled in the Europa-Institute’s postgraduate European Studies course and started to work as a research assistant to the then Director of the Institute, Professor Georg Ress. What started with a 10-hour/week research contract developed into an intensive working relationship that lasted through the years to this day. In 1992 I took up a full-time assistantship with Professor Ress. I earned a doctorate (Dr. jur.) with a dissertation on “State Immunity and the Violation of Human Rights” in 1995, which was then published by Kluwer Law International in 1997 and is held by many law libraries around the world, including UNE’s law library, which is a little surprising considering that the international law collection is, let us say, not yet complete. After the doctorate I was offered to stay on and pursue a habilitation, a procedure prerequisite for becoming a professor in Germany. The result of this was a monograph in German with the - translated - title “Transparency as a Constitutional Principle - Basic Law and European Union”. It was published by the Mohr-Siebeck publishing house in Germany in 2004. Formally this lead to my recognition as a professor of law by the faculty of the Saarland University School of Law (Privatdozent) in 2002. In Saarbrücken I mainly taught European Union law, public international and international institutions law and constitutional law.
In June 2006 I came to Armidale and my family arrived in September. Armidale is now our third home. Our secon home is Socorro, New Mexico, USA, where my wife Yvette is from and where a large part of our family lives. Socorro is a town even smaller than Armidale (approx. 9000 inhabitants) but with an equally dominating University, the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.
When I am not doing law I like to indulge in discussions of all sorts. Politics in general and international affairs in particular have always interested me. I love to read newspapers. Onto the much quoted island I would not take a book. I would take a subscription of the New York Times, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Südeutsche Zeitung and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. I am a big sports fan and I am willing to watch almost any sport. But my true passion is football (soccer). I have been a fan of 1.FCKaiserslautern ever since I can remember. But my real pride and joy are my two boys and - of course!
