by Prof. Dr. Armin Hatje
On November 22, 2024, Prof. Dr. Jörg Philipp Terhechte passed away at the age of 49 after a long and serious illness. With his passing, European law has lost one of its most creative, productive and intelligent academics, from whom much was to be expected in the future.
Jörg Philipp Terhechte, born in 1975 in Salzkotten, studied law at the University of Bielefeld from 1995. He passed the First State Examination in Law in 2000. He then became a research assistant at the chair of the undersigned at Bielefeld University. His award-winning doctoral thesis on “Ungeschriebene Tatbestandsmerkmale des europäischen Wettbewerbsrechts” (Unwritten features of European competition law) from 2003 marked one of his main areas of research, namely the national, European and international dimensions of competition law in the economy. In 2005, he passed the Second State Examination in Law and became a research assistant at the Chair of Public Law, European and International Law at the University of Bielefeld, a position he continued to hold after the undersigned moved to the University of Hamburg.
It was apparent even at this early stage that an outstanding young scholar was about to leave his mark on European law as a whole. His diverse functions and tasks can only be described in part here. In 2012, Jörg Philipp Terhechte took over a chair for public law, European and international law as well as regulatory and antitrust law at what is now the Faculty of Political Science at Leuphana University Lüneburg. As Vice President, he also helped shape the university over the years and led it into the circle of nationally and internationally outstanding research and study institutions.
In 2016, he became a member of the board of the Academic Society for European Law. In 2018, he accepted an appointment as Professor of European and International Economic Law at the University of Glasgow, a chair he held part-time alongside his many other commitments. Also in 2018, Jörg Philipp Terhechte became Managing Director of the Institute for European Integration at the Europa-Kolleg Hamburg and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Europa-Kolleg Hamburg Foundation. Numerous stays and guest lectures at foreign universities are evidence of his international appeal.
His academic contributions to public law, European Union law and international law cannot be acknowledged individually here. His work on antitrust and merger control proceedings in the major countries of the world alone is unparalleled. In addition, he has worked on almost every important provision of the Union treaties in various commentaries and was co-editor and author of the von der Groeben commentary and the Schwarze EU commentary. He was also the general editor of the now twelve-volume Encyclopaedia of European Law, a title that only very imperfectly reflects his decisive role in the creation of this work. He was also a member of the editorial board of the journal “Europarecht” for many years. He never made a secret of his – to put it simply – pro-European stance, but this did not prevent him from critically following the development of the European Union. His focus was on the overall structure of the Union and its member states as necessary and legitimate elements of a European constitutional union.
He did not live to see the publication of his last work “Die Haftung der Dritten Gewalt – Haftung als Baustein einer judicial accountability”. The work was accepted as a habilitation thesis by the Faculty of Law at the University of Hamburg in the summer of 2024. This thesis would no longer have been required to provide proof of suitability for a professorship. However, it was Jörg Philipp Terhechte’s lifelong ambition to finish a work he had started. Even under the difficult personal circumstances of the past year, he has succeeded in doing so masterfully.
Anyone who knew Jörg Philipp Terhechte as a person knows about his forward-looking energy, his personal loyalty and, last but not least, his witty sense of humor. His incredible courage in the last few years and his bravery in dealing with his serious illness, supported by his wonderful family, who were so important to him, complete the picture of an extraordinary person, who we must now sadly bid farewell to far too soon. However, Jörg Philipp Terhechte would only have allowed us a brief moment of mourning. His credo was always: We must move forward! We should consider this an obligation. As a person and scientist, he showed us the way.
