Civil Disobedience and the German Courts: The Pershing Missile Protests in Comparative Perspective [Hardcover]

In the 1980s the West German Peace Movement -- fearing that the stationing of NATO nuclear missiles in Germany threatened an imminent nuclear war in Europe -- engaged in massive protests, including sustained civil disobedience in the form of sit-down demonstrations.

Civil Disobedience and the German Courts traces the historical and philosophical background of this movement and follows a group of demonstrators through their trials in the German criminal courts up to the German Constitutional Court -- in which their fate was determined in two important constitutional cases. In this context, the volume also analyzes the German Constitutional Court, as a crucial institution of government, in comparative perspective.

The book is the first full-length English language treatment of these events and constitutional decisions, and it also places the decisions at an important turning-point in German constitutional history.

Introduction  1. The Anti-missile Demonstrations: The Protests and their Context  2. The Sit-down Blockades in the Criminal Courts  3. The Sit-down Blockades in the Constitutional Court: The Court and the Arguments  4. The Sit-down Blockades in the Constitutional Court: The Decisions of 1986 and 1995  5. The Great Cases of 1995: Success for the 'Long March' of 1968?  Epilogue

The book is the first full-length English language treatment of the civil disobedience of the West German Peace Movement in the 1980s and the resulting trials of some of its members in the German Constitutional Court. The book uses these events and critical cases to analyze the German Constitutional Court as a crucial institution of government, and it also places the outcomes of the cases atl#+