International Conference on Legitimacy Review in Proportionality Analysis at Max Planck Institute, Freiburg [Hybrid; 11-13 November 2026]

The Max Planck Center for Democracy, Security and Human Rights hosts an international conference at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law, Fürstenbergstr. 19, Freiburg, Germany, from 11–13 November 2026. The conference is hybrid. The announcement was posted by the UK Constitutional Law Association on October 30, 2026.

The proportionality principle has long stood as a hallmark of German legal scholarship and is a widely adopted framework for adjudicating conflicts between individual rights and collective interests. Its first sub-test, legitimacy review, which is the requirement that state action pursue a legitimate aim, remains strikingly underdeveloped in both doctrine and theory.

Courts and scholars alike tend to treat it as a largely formal or perfunctory inquiry, with substantive evaluation deferred to the later stages of analysis. The announcement says that a comparative survey of case law across jurisdictions, at both the national and supranational levels, bears out this diagnosis.

If legitimacy review is to serve a meaningful justificatory function, it ought to entail rigorous evaluation of the collective goods and interests invoked by the state before they can be relied upon as public reasons for the limitation of rights and freedoms.

Without this, the legitimate aims stage risks allowing trivial, unnecessary and morally questionable ends to justify interferences with human rights, undermining the distinctiveness and normative significance of fundamental rights and freedoms. If proportionality review is ultimately concerned with whether an interference with a right can be justified, legitimacy review must be equipped to engage more meaningfully with the moral questions raised by the aims the state pursues.

The conference aims to bring different strands of conversation into dialogue across four themes.

• Legitimacy Review in Comparative Perspective
• Roadblocks to Rigorous Legitimacy Review and Their Implications
• Proportionality Review: Beyond Negative Use Towards Positive Instruction
• Institutional Considerations and Constraints and the Future of Legitimacy Review

Together, these themes seek to restore rigorous legitimacy review, connected to its moral roots, to its proper place at the heart of proportionality review, while situating it within broader comparative and institutional realities. The aim is to equip it to grapple with the reasons that can legitimately justify the pursuit of particular state aims, particularly where doing so entails limitations on human rights and fundamental freedoms.

The conference will bring together esteemed judges, leading scholars in international human rights law, constitutional law, and moral and legal philosophy, and early career researchers worldwide. Approaches from these fields have too often developed in relative isolation from one another, and the conference aims to put them in dialogue.

As seating is limited, interested individuals are strongly encouraged to register for this event by contacting Martha Basazienw Kassa at m.kassa@csl.mpg.de.

The announcement does not state a registration fee, a registration deadline, a programme schedule or a certificate.