The Profile of the Judge in the European Tradition

The paper discusses the changing profile of the “judge” as a centre of nearly every legal culture in history. In the pre-modern eras the identity or distances between kings, priests and judges are decisive as indicators of the political model. Since the late 18th century the judge in European countries gets more and more a profile as an independent third function in the modern constitutional model. Today constitutional courts in many states and the European courts in Luxemburg and Strasburg are controlling the “normal judges” on every stage, but also the legislators. They do it although the interaction of national and international, European and private-produced law is more complex than