Bernhard Schlink

Bernhard Schlink is a German lawyer and writer. He was born in Bethel, Germany, to a German father and a Swiss mother, the youngest of four children. Both his parents were theology students, although his father lost his job as a Professor of Theology due to the Nazis, and had to settle on being a pastor instead. Bernhard Schlink was brought up in Heidelberg from the age of two. He studied law at West Berlin’s Free University, graduating in 1968.
Schlink became a judge at the Constitutional Court of the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia in 1988 and in 1992 a professor for public law and the philosophy of law at Humboldt University, Berlin. He retired in January 2006.