Verena Madner

Verena Madner (born May 12, 1965, in Linz) is an Austrian legal scholar, university professor and constitutional judge. She has been Professor of Public Law at the Department of Socio-Economics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business since 2011. In 2020, she was appointed Vice President of the Austrian Constitutional Court.

Personal life and education

Madner was born in 1965 to a Salzburg teacher and a Beninese judge in the Upper Austrian capital of Linz. She attended the Akademisches Gymnasium Salzburg, where she graduated with honors in 1983. Afterwards she began studying at the Institute for Translation and Interpreting at the University of Vienna in 1983. At the same time, Madner began studying law at the Law Faculty of the University of Vienna in 1984. In November 1989 she was funded there for the Magistra of Law (Mag. Iur.).

After starting her doctorate in law at the University of Vienna in 1989, Madner began her first job as a semi-employed contract assistant at the Institute for Constitutional and Administrative Law at the Vienna University of Economics and Business in October 1990, where she became a university assistant in March 1991.

In 2020, Madner was nominated by the Federal Government Kurz II as Vice President of the Austrian Constitutional Court. With the appointment by Federal President Alexander Van der Bellen on April 24, 2020, she became the second woman to be appointed to this highest judicial office.