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Prof. Dr. Dr. Wolfgang Durner LL.M.

Wolfgang Durner, born in 1967, studied law and political science at the Universities of Würzburg, Berlin (FU), Munich and at the London School of Economics (Master of Laws 1993). He received doctorates in both subjects under the tuitions of Prof. Franz Schneider in Munich (politics) and Prof. Philip Kunig in Berlin (law). After his legal clerkship in Berlin, he served one and a half years there as an assistant to Prof. Michael Kloepfer in the Independent Expert Commission on the Environmental Code at the Federal Ministry for the Environment in 1996/97. He spent the year 1997/98 as a Fritz Thyssen Fellow at the Institute for International Studies at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, where he wrote his doctoral thesis in law. He then worked for more than two years as a lawyer at the Munich office of the commercial law firm GSK. In 2001, he became assistant and subsequently senior academic assistant to the then President of the Federal Constitutional Court Prof. Hans-Jürgen Papier at the University of Munich, where he received his ‘Habilitation’ in 2004.

Following a term as a visiting professor at the ‘Freie Universität Berlin’ and a teaching position at the Munich School of Public Policy, he was appointed full Professor at the ‘Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität’ and has been Director of the Institute for the Law of Water and Waste Management here since March 2006. He has also been a member of the University Senate and Head of the Graduate School of the Department of Law since 2018. He declined further calls to the universities of Bayreuth, Trier and Tübingen.

Wolfgang Durner is the head of the permanent information and initiative group ‘planning law’ of the Academy for Spatial Development in the Leibniz Association, a trusted lecturer of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation and the Konrad Redeker Foundation and a member of numerous other expert committees. From 2007 to 2023, he was chairman of the German Research Group on Road Law. He is (co-)editor of several journals and publication series, including the leading commentary on environmental law ‘Landmann/Rohmer’, and editor in chief of the oldest German public law journal ‘Deutsches Verwaltungsblatt’. His special academic interests are - by no means exclusively - environmental, planning and infrastructure law as well as general administrative law.