Professor Ernst-Joachim Mestmäcker receives the Hayek Medal

Posted by D. Daniel Sokol

From the press release:

Prof. Ernst-Joachim Mestmäcker, Emeritus Director at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, has been awarded the Friedrich August von Hayek Medal of the Hayek-Gesellschaft. Prof. Mestmäcker is being honoured for his work on Ordnungspolitik as well as German and European competition law. By strengthening liberal thought and the political process, his academic efforts have steadfastly contributed to principles underpinning liberty.

In his laudatio at this year’s meeting of the Hayek-Gesellschaft in Jena, Gerhard Schwarz, Business and Economics Editor of the Neuen Züricher Zeitung, praised Prof. Mestmäcker as, above all, a jurist who tackled the topic of competition with unparalleled tenacity, doing so not merely from a perspective of market functionality but rather with an ordoliberal understanding: recognising it as an instrument for checking power. Mestmäcker, per Schwarz, has deliberated upon the boundaries of state, society and private autonomy. In so doing he has shown himself to be equally at home in the field of economics as in the legal sciences. This is reflected, he concluded, in a deeper understanding: whereas the economy and economics are not subordinate to the state or society, the law is, conversely, not subsumed by economics.