Hermann Pünder

Professor Pünder holds the chair of Public Law, Science of Public Administration and Comparative Law at Bucerius Law School in Hamburg, Germany. In the academic year 2011/2012 he was Vice-President of the Law School.

Born in Cologne in 1966, Hermann Pünder studied law and political science at the Universities of Freiburg, Geneva (Switzerland) and Münster, and at the Faculté Internationale de Droit Comparé in Strasbourg (France). In 1992, he completed the First State Exam in Laws at the Oberlandesgericht (Higher Appellate Court) in Freiburg. In 1993, he earned his LL.M.-degree from the University of Iowa. In 1995, Pünder was awarded a doctorate (Doctor iuris) at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster for his comparative thesis on executive rulemaking. In 1996, he passed the Second State Exam in Law at the Higher Appellate Court in Cologne.

Before joining the Bucerius Law School, Pünder worked at the University of Münster at the Institute for Public Economic Law (Institut für Öffentliches Wirtschaftsrecht), as chief executive officer of the Centre for Foreign Trade Law (Zentrum für Außenwirtschaftsrechtsrecht) and as director of the Freiherr-vom-Stein-Institut, an independently financed research institution on administrative law. From 1999 to 2002, Pünder was Distinguished Citizen (Sachkundiger Bürger) in the Council of the City of Münster. In June 2002, he obtained his postdoctoral professorship qualification (Habilitation) at the University of Münster with a thesis on the reform of budget law. He was awarded the venia legendi for public law, European law, science of public administration and comparative law.

Between 2011 and 2012, Hermann Pünder was member of „Expert Dialog About Germanys Future“ for the Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel. In 2012, he gave a key lecture on the “Crisis of Representative Democracy” at the annual meeting of the Vereinigung der deutschen Staatsrechtslehrer, the Association of German, Austrian and Swiss public law professors. Between 2014 and 2017, he was speaker of the Association’s committee on administrative law. Professor Pünder was a guest at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (2005, 2006), at the University of Oxford (2007, 2009), at the Catholic University of Argentina in Buenos Aires (2009), at Stanford Law School (2012), at the Instanbul Bilgi University (2013, 2016), and at the Waseda-University in Tokyo (2018). He is member of the International Academy of Comparative Law and of the German Gesellschaft für Rechtsvergleichung.