Two examinations, one qualification

Her education begins in the Tauber valley. In 1998 she passed the Abitur at the Matthias-Grünewald-Gymnasium in Tauberbischofsheim, the district town of the Main-Tauber district. The Abitur is the general university entrance qualification; because school education is a matter for the Länder, its format is set by each state. The documented record goes no further than the school and the year, and this profile does not add subjects or grades that the sources do not contain. Early life and the region describes the background.

From 1998 to 2002 she studied law at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. Founded in 1386, Heidelberg is the oldest university in present-day Germany, and its law faculty is among the most established in the country. A German law degree is not a free-standing qualification in the way an LLB is in common-law countries; the course is built around the state examination at its end. Students work through the three pillars of German law — civil law, criminal law and public law, including constitutional and administrative law — largely through the method of solving written cases.

The public-law strand is worth noting in her case. Administrative law, the law governing the relationship between citizens and public authorities, later became one of the main fields of her practice, and the interior and legal-affairs committees of the Bundestag, in which she sat for most of her parliamentary career, deal constantly with its questions.

In 2003 she passed the First State Examination in Law. Traditionally this examination was organised entirely by the state's judicial examination office (in Baden-Württemberg, the Landesjustizprüfungsamt) and consisted of several written papers followed by an oral examination before a panel. A federal reform that took effect in 2003 renamed it the "First Legal Examination" and added a university-run specialisation component that counts towards the final mark, while the compulsory subjects remain a state examination. Transitional provisions allowed candidates who had begun their studies earlier to complete the examination under the previous rules. The Bundestag biographies record her result, passed in 2003, as the First State Examination (Erstes Juristisches Staatsexamen).

The second stage is the Rechtsreferendariat, a two-year preparatory service in which trainees are employed by the state and assigned to a regional court as their base. Hers was the Landgericht Mosbach, the regional court seated in the Neckar-Odenwald district. Under the German Judiciary Act, trainees pass through compulsory stations — a civil court, a criminal court or public prosecutor's office, an administrative authority and a lawyer's office — and one or more elective stations. Each station combines practical work on real files with training courses.

The Referendariat is where legal theory meets procedure: drafting judgments, preparing indictments, writing administrative decisions and pleadings. Her traineeship ran from 2003 to 2005 and overlapped with the beginning of her local political career; she was elected to the Tauberbischofsheim municipal council in 2004.

In 2005 she passed the Second State Examination in Law. It tests the ability to handle cases as a practitioner would — from the perspective of a judge, a lawyer or an administrator — in written papers and a final oral examination. Passing it confers the qualification to hold judicial office under § 5 of the German Judiciary Act. Holders are often called "Volljuristen", fully qualified lawyers, and they may enter any of the regulated legal professions without further qualifying exams.

Since 2006 she has been admitted as a lawyer (Rechtsanwältin). Admission to the bar in Germany is regulated by the Federal Lawyers' Act and requires the qualification for judicial office. Her Bundestag biographies record work in medium-sized law firms with administrative law and social law among her fields. The next chapter, the legal career, covers that practice in detail.