Photos: Sarah Blesener

After a year of elections around the world and elections in Germany next year, the ACG and 1014 were joined for a discussion by Prof. Franz Mayer, Chair in Public Law, European Law, Comparative Law, and Law and Politics at the University of Bielefeld and Scholar in Residence at Columbia University. He spoke about electoral processes as fundamental pillars of democracies - How can they be designed in a way that citizens truly have a voice in governance? And, how can they be safeguarded against fraud or violence, or allegations thereof?

Biography

Franz C. Mayer holds the Chair in Public Law, European Law, Public International Law, Comparative Law and Law and Politics at the University of Bielefeld (Law Faculty). He studied Law, Political Science and History at the Universities of Bonn and Munich, at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences-Po) and at Yale Law School. Visiting researcher Harvard Law School 2000; annual Visiting lecturer University of Warsaw since 2000; Visiting professor at Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne) 2007 and at Paris 2 (Panthéon-Assas) 2010; General Course Academy of European Law, European University Institute, Florence, 2011; Senior Emile Noël Fellow, NYU School of Law 2011; Visiting professor of Law at Columbia Law School Winter term 2012/2013; Short Term International Visiting Professor of Law at Columbia Law School Fall term 2024 (non-resident).

His teaching and research interests focus on European constitutional and administrative law, on comparative law, on the relationship between European law and politics, on parliaments in times of globalization, on internet law, sports law (European soccer law) and more generally on international law and public law.

Professor Mayer was Counsel in proceedings at the German Constitutional Court to the German Parliament in the Treaty of Lisbon-trial in 2008-2009 and in the first case related to the Euro-crisis, the case on the Euro stabilization mechanism 2010-2012, his most recent case for the German Parliament was the Next Generation EU-case on the €800 billion temporary recovery instrument (2021-2022). He was Counsel at the German Constitutional Court to the German government in the CETA case (2016-2022) and in the case on the Unified European Patent Court (2017-2020). His most recent case for the German government concerns the constitutionality of the new EP election law (2023-2024).

He has been teaching the Introduction to EU law at the German Foreign Service Academy since 2010. He has also been teaching in an annual “European constitutionalism seminar” at the Law Faculty of the University of Warsaw for more than 20 years, since 2000, with Professors Mirosław Wyrzykowski, Christophe Hillion and Adam Bodnar.

He has frequently testified as an expert witness in parliamentary hearings on constitutional law and EU law at the German Parliament and elsewhere. He was invited to the Polish Senate to testify as an expert on the reform of the Polish judiciary in January 2020.

In 2023, he was part of a Franco-German Group of 12 experts invited by the German and the French minister for Europe to write a report on institutional reform of the EU.