Again and again surveys show that the German Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht = BVerfG) is the most popular institution with the Germans. This probably has to do with the fact that people see the court and thereby its judges as hovering somewhere above the turbulences/down-side of party politics. Interestingly the media coverage of the judges from the BVerfG is much lower than for political elites; personalization and mediatization play a smaller role for the judges than they do in politics. This little interest from the public in the judicial elites is also reflected by a quite astonishing neglect from political science. In contrast to political elites which have been studied for at least 40 years in a systematic way in Germany, the study of constitutional court judges has largely been focused on the question of party membership and thus whether there is a (party)politicalization of the BVerfG. Indeed, this is an important question, but others, like for example regarding the biographic as well as institutional factors determining the selection of BVerfG-judges that are just as relevant, have been disregarded too long. These questions nevertheless become more and more important with BVerfG-judges increasingly stepping out of their judicial shadow into the light of everyday politics. In this paper we will use a newly compiled dataset of complete careers of judges at the BVerfG (1951-2013). Applying sequence-analysis we will check whether there is some common pattern in the careers of German constitutional court judges, whether such a pattern is constant through time or changing, which role party affiliation plays in the selection process, whether alumni from certain universities are more often appointed, and whether the BVerfG is a dead end in terms of a political career or whether it can also be used as stepping stone towards even more prestigious positions.
