Lukas C. H.Fest

Doctoral researcher in Bayreuth

I’m a research associate at the Chair of Public Law IV in Bayreuth, where I studied law as well. Most of what I do is about the German Federal Constitutional Court.

Outside work I sing, dive when I can, and tinker with tech and AI.

Research

My dissertation asks how closely the Court should be looking over the legislature’s shoulder. I take that to be a comparative question rather than an abstract one: on a given issue, does the Court actually do better than parliament, the ordinary courts or the administration? Where it doesn’t, a searching standard of review is hard to defend — and working out which cases those are is most of the work.

Working title: comparative institutional analysis and the intensity of constitutional review by the German Federal Constitutional Court. Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Carsten Bäcker.

Teaching

I teach the introductory tutorial in state organisation law (Propädeutische Übung), and will be doing so again in the coming winter term. In 2025 I co-developed and taught a course on game theory and law for the Deutsche SchülerAkademie, which was more fun than it had any right to be.