Wolfgang Hoffmann-Riem (born March 4, 1940, in Hannover) is a German legal scholar and a former justice of the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany.
Hoffmann-Riem has sought to change the understanding of law as a discipline dealing mainly with the interpretation of norms to one in which actions and decisions focus on resolution of problems.
Traditionally having two parts, the manner of instruction he helped to create forged a stronger bond between the once-separate theoretical and practical aspects.
In numerous advisory roles with governments, parliaments, and organizations, as well as his participation in a variety of commissions, he has strived to include the voice of practitioners.
In addition, his extensive research and teaching engagements abroad (e.g., at Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, and Melbourne) have enabled him to incorporate views from other legal systems as well.
While this transformation was happening, he was head of the Hans Bredow Institute for Radio and Television, whose main focus was on sociological issues.
Hoffmann-Riem has seen environmental law as another example of a field warranting closer examination of the problems associated with traditional governmental regulation – variously characterized by writers as a "crisis" – and of the need for new regulatory approaches.
Another project ensuing from this discussion on reform was a systematic handbook with Hoffmann-Riem as editor – again with Schmidt-Aßmann and also Andreas Voßkuhle – entitled "Fundamentals of Administrative Law" ("Grundlagen des Verwaltungsrechts"), which have been published in 2006 till 2009, second edition 2012/2013.
In 1999 the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) nominated the politically unaffiliated scholar Hoffman-Riem as judge of the Federal Constitutional Court, and he was subsequently elected by the Bundesrat.
In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, he authored a series of decisions that gave rise to spirited public debate, including those on freedom of assembly and the relationship between freedom and security (for example, decisions on sweeping wiretapping powers ["Großen Lauschangriff"], wiretapping using foreign trade law or general police regulations, profiling, online searches, automated recording of car license plates, and data retention.)
In these decisions (for example, in the ruling dealing with online searches), the Constitutional Court dealt extensively with developments in current technology that have long been the subject of Hoffmann-Riem's research.