Email: S.Baer@lse.ac.uk
Susanne Baer is the Professor of Public Law and Gender Studies at Humboldt University Berlin and a Lea Bates Global Law Professor at the University of Michigan Law School. From 2011 until 2023, she served as Justice of the Federal Constitutional Court in Germany. She also received honorary doctorates from the University of Michigan (2014), the University of Hasselt (2017) and the University of Lucerne (2018). In the UK, she is a Corresponding Fellow at the British Academy of Arts and Scienes, where she gave the Maccabean Lecture in 2019. She has taught at CEU Budapest, in Austria, Switzerland and, most recently, at University of Toronto, with former Canadian Supreme Court Justice Rosalie Abella.
Currently at Humboldt, Susanne teaches the mandatory lecture course on law and sociology, an advanced course on interdisciplinary analyses of law-making, and a colloquium on classics of feminist jurisprudence. She also regularly teaches a course on comparative constitutionalism, focusing on inequalities and judging under pressure.
Susanne studied law and political science in Berlin and Michigan. She was active in movements against discrimination, including pornography, sexual harassment and domestic violence. At Humboldt University, she directed the GenderCompetenceCentre to advise the German government on gender mainstreaming 2003-2010. She has also served as Vice-President for International and Student Affairs, as Director of Gender Studies and Vice Dean of the Faculty of Law. There, she initated the Law and Society Institute Berlin and the Humboldt Law Clinic of Fundamental and Human Rights. Currently, beyond serving on editorial boards, she is the director of the board of the Stiftung Forum Recht, a federal foundation of the German Bundestag to explain, defend, and reflect on rule of law.
Publications in English include: Comparative Constitutionalism (Thomson/West 2022 )(Dorsen, Rosenfeld, Sajó, Mancini); The Rule of—and not by any—Law. On Constitutionalism, Current Legal Problems 71 (2018) 335; 'The Difference a Justice May Make: Remarks at the Symposium for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg', Columbia J of Gender & Law 25 (2013), 'Equality', in: Rosenfeld/ Sajo, The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Constitutional Law (OUP 2012,) 982; 'Dignity, Liberty, Equality: A Fundamental Rights Triangle of Constitutionalism', Toronto LJ 4 (2009) 417.
There are several lectures online, including Adjudicating Inequalities: Bernstein Lecture 2013-2014; "The Future of the University Community", A Dialogue with Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Susanne Baer, University of Michigan 2017.