by Susan Griffith

Kenneth F. Ledford, associate professor of history and law, has become the first CWRU faculty member to receive a Berlin Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin.

In January 2004, Ledford will travel to Germany and for five months reside at the Hans Arnhold Center of the American Academy in Berlin-Wannsee to finish writing his new book, Prussian Judges and the Rule of Law in Germany, 1848-1914.

Ledford began researching this new book in German archives with support of a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship (1997-1998) and a Fellowship of the German Marshall Fund of the United States (1998-1999).

"This book explores the role of the Prussian judiciary in the implementation of the rule of law in Germany between 1848 and 1914," Ledford said.

Recent events as diverse as the legal response of the United States government to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and state-building efforts in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have focused debate upon the rule of law in democratic societies with capitalist economies.

Ledford looks at how central to the rule of law is an independent, self-confident judiciary, whose assigned role in a separation-of-powers structure of government is to apply civil and criminal law predictably and impartially, free of interference from the executive and the legislature.

Despite contemporary critiques, and regardless of misbehavior during the Weimar Republic and Third Reich, Ledford said Prussian judges in this era proved remarkably adept at implementing and administering a rule of law that promoted astounding economic growth and diverged in no significant way from the commitment to the rule of law of the judiciaries of other capitalist states.

Indeed, the subsequent German history of departure from the rule of law illustrates the limits of the rule of law more than the deviance of German experience, according to Ledford.

Former Ambassador to the United Nations Richard Holbrooke and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger established the American Academy in Berlin to maintain strong ties between Germany and the United States after the end of the Cold War. The academy hosted its first set of Fellows during the 1998-1999 academic year and annually provides support in Berlin for 20 to 30 scholars from a variety of disciplines.

Ledford joined the history department at CWRU in 1991 and is the author of an earlier work in German legal history, From General Estate to Special Interest: German Lawyers 1878-1933 (Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Upon his return from the American Academy in Berlin in 2004, he will become editor of Central European History, published by the Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association.

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