Powerful Court Decisions. The Case of the German Constitutional Court

What are politically powerful Court decisions? How to measure their strength toward the other political actors? And what makes these decision ‘authoritative’ in the different fields of judicial jurisdiction? As in many other countries, there has been a long-standing discourse in Germany, especially among constitutional lawyers, on the raking of ‘the’ most important decisions of the German Constitutional Court (GCC). So far, the criteria for such a compilation have been far from clear. At best, the rankings (by selected college books) have been based on expert impressions and insider evaluations of former judges of the GCC. This paper suggests a different, more methodologically driven way of approaching the research questions: First, it will make use of the JUDICON framework, which is a coherent method to map the multi-faceted reality of constitutional adjudication, to sample politically powerful GCC’s decisions (Pocza et al 2017). Second, it will come up with a new approach to identify the authoritative status of these decisions within the different fields of jurisdiction by means of a QCA analysis. Based on these two analytical steps the paper will able to present a sound ranking of the politically most powerful decisions of the GCC.