Ludwig Adamovich

Ludwig Karl Adamovich (24 August 1932 – 16 June 2024), commonly known as Ludwig Adamovich Jr., was an Austrian constitutional scholar, civil servant, and educator. From 1956 to 1984, Adamovich worked for the Constitutional Service of the Austrian Chancellery; he also taught law at the University of Graz. From 1984 to 2002, he served as the president of the Austrian Constitutional Court. From 2004, Adamovich acted, on an honorary basis, as an advisor on matters of constitutional law to Presidents Heinz Fischer and Alexander Van der Bellen.

Early life Ludwig Karl Adamovich was born in Innsbruck, Tyrol, Austria, on 24 August 1932.

His father was Ludwig Adamovich Sr., a noted legal scholar and a member of the Austrian Constitutional Court at the time. The family was conservative; the elder Adamovich had been educated at the Jesuit Kalksburg College, supported the Christian Social Party, and would later become minister of justice for the Austrofascist government of Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg. The relationship between father and son was difficult. Adamovich Sr. was controlling and pedantic; Adamovich Jr. was unable to meet his father's expectations either academically or in terms of personality.

Adamovich received his secondary education at the Akademisches Gymnasium.

Career After graduating from the Gymnasium, Adamovich enrolled at the University of Vienna to study law, receiving his doctorate in 1954. In his 2011 autobiography, Adamovich freely admits that his career was greatly helped by his father's reputation and, especially in its early years, by his family's political connections to the Austrian People's Party.

As from 1 January 1984 Adamovich was appointed president of the Constitutional Court. He held this position for nineteen years, leaving the court when he reached the mandatory retirement age of seventy in 2002. Adamovich's tenure was a period of modernization; his leadership represented a break with the old ways in several respects. Among other things, Adamovich worked to establish relationships with sibling constitutional courts in other countries, especially with the new constitutional courts created during the 1990s in former Eastern Bloc nations.

Politics Adamovich was considered right of center, although with a permissive, humanistic streak.

Immediately after graduating from university, Adamovich used his family's connections to the Austrian People's Party to secure employment in the Lower Austrian bureaucracy, a fact he openly talks about in his autobiography. He formally joined to People's Party in 1956. The dispute led to personal attacks on Adamovich by Haider that commentators have described as vulgar. When Haider accused Adamovich of misconduct in office, Adamovich insisted on being formally investigated; the inquest exonerated him roundly.

Defamation case In 2008, then-Minister of the Interior Günther Platter asked Adamovich to chair an inquest into the police investigation of the abduction of Natascha Kampusch. Kampusch was a girl from Vienna who had been abducted, at age 10, in 1998; she was not heard from again until she walked away from her abductor more than eight years later. Critics alleged that Kampusch would have found been quickly and easily had investigators not committed a number of inexplicable unforced errors. The official version of events published by the authorities when the case was finally closed was considered improbable by some. Investigators blamed the entire affair on a single criminal acting alone, even though Kampusch's abduction and captivity would have been logistically challenging and even though eyewitnesses claimed to have seen abductors; the main suspect conveniently killed himself after Kampusch made her escape but before he could be apprehended.

In 2009, Adamovich gave a series of interviews in which he stated that he too had come to doubt the official version of events. Additionally, he speculated that Kampusch's life in captivity may not have been much worse than her earlier life with her dysfunctional family; Kampusch's mother may have been physically abusing the child; Kampusch may have stayed with her abductor more or less voluntarily. Kampusch's mother demanded that Adamovich be prosecuted; Adamovich was found guilty of defamation and fined. The judge presiding over his trial, Birgit Schneider, was the daughter of Otto Schneider, a former head of the Vienna prosecution service whose decisions in the Kampusch case Adamovich had also been criticized. The family connection caused commentators such as Johann Rzeszut, a former president of the Austrian Supreme Court of Justice and a member of the inquest committee himself, to call the verdict a miscarriage of justice; according to Rzeszut, Birgit Schneider would have been obligated to recuse herself.

Death Adamovich died on 16 June 2024, at the age of 91.

Selected awards 1974: Decoration of Honor in Gold for Services to the Republic of Austria 1979: Grand Decoration of Honor in Gold for Services to the Republic of Austria 1995: Gold medal of the Masaryk University 1995: Wilhelm Hartel Award of the Austrian Academy of Sciences 1996: Honorary doctorate of the University of Osijek 1997: Honorary doctorate of the University of Graz 2001: Grand Cross of the Order of Isabella the Catholic 2002: Honorary doctorate of the University of Wrocław

Publications

Standard textbooks Together with Bernd-Christian Funk, Gerhart Holzinger, and Stefan Leo Frank, Adamovich is the author of , a four-volume general introduction to Austrian constitutional law. The first volume was first published in 1997, the last volume in 2009; all four volumes have been revised and reprinted at least once:

Selected other books