In each issue of our newsletter, we introduce people from our firm personally. This time it is the turn of Robert H.D. Reimer from our Cologne office.

Robert H.D. Reimer, LL.M. grew up in the suburbs of Cologne. After graduating from high school and doing his civilian service, he moved to the south of the republic, where he began studying law. Surrounded by wheat beer, “Kaiserschmarrn” (sliced and sugared pancake) and Bavarian customs in the federal state capital of Munich, he not only gained new insights during his time there at the Ludwig-Maximilian-University, but also found a second home to his Cologne roots and maintains with it ever since a lively contact.

With the first Bavarian state bar exam in his pocket, Robert H.D. Reimer decided to start his legal clerkship in his hometown and moved in order to this to Cologne, where he also passed the second North Rhine-Westphalian state bar exam. During his legal clerkship it became increasingly clear that public law was supposed to be the main field of his career. Although he had already turned more closely to international law, European law and integrative constitutional law during his major studies, civil law and the fundamental questions of criminal law were always able to arouse his particular interest, especially when different areas of law or legal systems were to be intertwined or had to be interlocked. A decisive impulse for Robert H.D. Reimer to continue to deal with public law professionally was given not least by the last station of his legal clerkship, which he gratefully could spend at the Federal Constitutional Court in the department of Justice of the Second Senate of the Federal Constitutional Prof. Dr. Peter M. Huber, Minister (ret.).

With a focus on public law it was clear to Robert H.D. Reimer that after his legal clerkship, his time would be well invested in the German University of Administrative Sciences Speyer’s LL.M.-program. Even though he did not expect to graduate at the top of his class, he was delighted about this, since this gave him the opportunity to submit his master's thesis to an academic publisher to consequently make his findings accessible to a larger audience. In the meantime, his work has been published by the Nomos Verlag under the title "State Immunity and Sovereign Debt. Sovereign Mandatory Restructuring of Foreign Sovereign Bonds before National Courts" (Baden-Baden 2020). Besides his work at FGvW, Robert H.D. Reimer is currently pursuing a SJD project on the public law-sector.

Although as a child Robert H.D. Reimer did not have a specific career aspiration in a classical sense, it was quite clear to him that his job would probably rather deal with one’s mind than one's hands, since this corresponded to the culture of discussion lived in his private environment and his personal disposition, which always revealed an interest in social discourse.

What Robert H.D. Reimer particularly appreciates about his work is the opportunity to work from a constitutive legal approach. For Robert H.D. Reimer, the proviso-jurisprudential aspect of working as a lawyer - combined with a certain degree of freedom - is one of the special attractions of the profession. Compared to other classical professions in the legal system, namely the judiciary or the public service, the advocate is, on one hand, allowed to "get into the game earlier" than the judge and, on the other hand, is not subject to a hierarchical organizational structure as it can be found in the system of public administration. Accordingly, the professional field of the lawyer offers a special space for creativity and scientific work, which Robert H.D. Reimer personally sees as a special, not self-evident enrichment.

In his work, Robert H.D. Reimer also enjoys being able to regularly deal with the interlocking of legal systems and fields of law. In this way, his work as a lawyer enriches his daily life in a way that his scope of professional activity is not limited to a narrow specific legal field, but takes him on a journey from the intricacies of specialized law to the requirements of European law and the fundamental principles of constitutional and international law, without losing the reference to it’s practical relevance of his work.

In his spare time, Robert H.D. Reimer enjoys nature, culture and good food, he reads (currently “Talks about the State. Conversations with Robert Habeck, Peter M. Huber, Norbert Lammert, Edzard Schmidt-Jortzig, Andreas Voßkuhle”, Munich 2017 by Utz Schliesky and „Catechism of Heraldry. Basic features of heraldry”, 3^rd ed., Leipzig 1880 by Eduard Freiherr von Sacken) and writes, does sports, exchanges ideas with friends and seeks new challenges. Although Robert H.D. Reimer does not have a favorite travel destination in a classical sense, a certain preference for countries with western culture is looming. Especially the advantages of France know to convince him: La bonne cuisine, unique red wine, alpine and maritime in the natural landscape of the Hexagon, the Belle Époque buildings in Baron Haussmann's Paris as well as the poets and thinkers "outre rhin" (seen from a German point of view) speak for themselves at this point.