In Brandenburg, the official form for proposing a task for the Abitur, the final school examination, includes an Erwartungshorizont, a horizon of expectation. Its first section is headed Beschreibung der vom Prüfling erwarteten Leistung, a description of the performance expected of the candidate. A second section gives the criteria for marking. In Bavaria, the ministry provides teachers with such sheets for the final German examination of the Realschule. They set a framework within which the student’s work is to be marked. The ministry adds that teachers können und müssen auf kreative und individuelle Schülerleistungen eingehen, can and must respond to creative and individual answers.
Pain by the Table
Section 253 of the Civil Code gives an injured person eine billige Entschädigung in Geld, fair compensation in money, for pain and suffering. To find the amount, German lawyers and judges consult Schmerzensgeldtabellen. These are published collections of earlier judgments, sorted by injury. One legal journal calls them an indispensable aid. They help courts treat similar cases alike, but they do not bind them. The Higher Regional Court of Frankfurt once went further. It calculated the sum day by day, at about 150 euros for each day in intensive care and 60 euros for each day in a rehabilitation clinic. It reached 200,000 euros for a driver who had lost his lower leg. On 15 February 2022, the Federal Court of Justice set the judgment aside. Such a count, it said, leaves out essential circumstances of the case. Pain and suffering need a view of all the circumstances together.
Who Chooses the Operating Method
In 2024 the Deutsches Ärzteblatt, the journal of the German medical profession, published a legal article on who may instruct whom among hospital doctors. The chief physician may give detailed instructions to junior doctors in training. That right shrinks as they gain expertise. “The more qualified the subordinate doctors are, the smaller the room” for instructions. If a senior physician masters an operating method that meets the medical standard, the chief may not require her to use the method the chief prefers. The author, a lawyer, describes this as the legal position. It is an interpretation, not a statute.
It Is Wrong to Order Details
German fire brigades work under the service regulation FwDV 100 on leadership in operations. Its 1999 edition defines Auftragstaktik, mission tactics, as a concept of leadership that leaves the crews as much freedom as possible in carrying out the task. Entscheidend ist das Erreichen des vorgegebenen Ziels. What counts is reaching the given goal. The order may be limited to a clear statement of that goal. The regulation also says: Es ist falsch, Einzelheiten zu befehlen, die die nachgeordneten Führungskräfte an Ort und Stelle besser übersehen. It is wrong to order details that the subordinate leaders on the spot can judge better.
The Air Traffic Controllers of 1973
Civil servants in Germany may not strike. Beginning on Ascension Day, 31 May 1973, and until the end of the year, West German air traffic controllers slowed down traffic at several German airports by Dienst nach Vorschrift, working strictly to the rules. German Wikipedia notes that this method let civil servants get around their ban on striking. The airlines put their losses at about 235 million marks. In 1981 the Federal Administrative Court ruled that collective actions which reduce the work performed violate a civil servant’s duty to carry out the office conscientiously. In 1984 the federal government had to pay Lufthansa more than 113 million marks in damages for the “air traffic controllers’ action of 1973.”
The Framework Training Plan
A national training regulation for a recognized occupation must contain an Ausbildungsrahmenplan, a framework training plan, which sets out what an apprentice must learn and in roughly what order. Training regulations typically require each company to write its own training plan for each apprentice on this basis. They allow the company to change the order and the timing soweit betriebspraktische Besonderheiten die Abweichung erfordern, as far as the company’s practical circumstances require it.
In Their Own Responsibility
The school law of North Rhine-Westphalia describes the teacher’s freedom and its frame in one sentence. Teachers teach, educate, advise, assess and supervise their students in eigener Verantwortung, on their own responsibility, im Rahmen, within the framework, of the educational goals, the applicable laws and regulations, the orders of the school authorities and the decisions of the school’s conferences. In Hesse, the principal may intervene in the teaching of a fully trained teacher only when a rule has been broken. After the shock of the first PISA study in 2000, the states committed to applying national educational standards from the 2004–05 school year. The standards fix what students must be able to do at the end. They are meant to give schools and teachers greater freedom in choosing and arranging the content.
With eye-measure
Mit Augenmaß — with eye-measure. The German phrase for judgment exercised in proportion, and it is praise.
Fingerspitzengefühl — fingertip feeling. Sensitivity in handling a situation, and it is what experience is supposed to produce.
Nach bestem Wissen und Gewissen — to the best of knowledge and conscience. A formula used in German declarations and reports where certainty is not available.
The individual case
German administrative and legal language returns to it constantly — im Einzelfall, in the individual case, Einzelfallprüfung, individual examination. The general rule is stated and the particular case is then examined against it.
Proportionality
A constitutional principle in German law with a defined three-part test: suitability, necessity, and appropriateness in the narrow sense. Judgment is required, and the structure within which it must be exercised is itself specified.