Susanne Baer

SUSANNE BAER studied German law and political science at the Free University of Berlin. Baer has been the William W. Cook Global Law Professor at the University of Michigan Law School since winter 2010 and is also a professor of public law and gender studies with the Law Faculty at Humboldt University of Berlin and its dean of academic affairs.
She also served as director of the Centre for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies and the GenderCompetenceCentre. She currently directs the Law and Society Institute Berlin. Her teaching has led her to Budapest, Bielefeld, Erfurt, Linz, and Toronto, and her research areas include socio-cultural legal studies, feminist legal and gender studies, law against discrimination, and comparative constitutional law. She coauthored the casebook Comparative Constitutionalism and is the author of the German textbook on law and sociology, Rechtssoziologie.
Baer has been a judge of the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany since February 2011, when she was elected to the Court by a committee of the German Parliament for a 12-year term. In 2015, Baer was one of the judges who overturned the ban on the wearing of hijabs in German classrooms, arguing that a general prohibition, incumbent on teachers in state schools, of expressing religious beliefs by outer appearance is not compatible with their freedom of faith and their freedom to profess a belief.