Johannes Masing - Biography#

Johannes Masing is Professor of Public Law at the University of Freiburg/Brsg. (Germany) since 2007. He served as a justice of the German Federal Constitutional Court from 2008 to 2020, where he was a member of the First Senate. From 1998 to 2007 he was a Professor of Public Law in Augsburg/Bavaria. Before going to Augsburg, he studied law, philosophy and piano in Freiburg/Brsg. and clerked at the German Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe to Justice Böckenförde between 1992 and 1996. He passed his habilitation in 1997, his doctoral exam in 1996 and his legal exams in 1989 and 1985. Johannes Masing has also a graduated in piano and then passed postgraduate studies at the academies of music in Freiburg and Stuttgart. After high school he studied French as second language at the University of Grenoble (France). Born in 1959 he grew up in Hamburg.

Today his research as a law professor is focused on German constitutional law, comparative constitutional law and European constitutional history. He was visiting professor and scholar at the University of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor (USA), the Jagellonian University in Krakow (Poland), at the universities Paris I, II and Lyon III (France) and at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in Philadelphia. Masing is director of the German-French conference on constitutional and administrative law. In 2008 he was awarded the Prix Gay Lussac-Humboldt. In 2020 he was bestowed the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany by the President of the Federal Republic of Germany.