By Brian Leiter

Professor Alexy, who was emeritus at the University of Kiel in Germany (where he spent most of his academic career), was better-known and quite influential throughout the civil law world (and especially in South America) for his formal theory of proportionality and balancing in constitutional adjudication. He was also a defender of an anti-positivist theory of law, according to which all law claims moral correctness, and (unlike Anglophone natural law theorists, but arguably like Dworkin) very unjust “laws” are not really laws.