German Dr. Axel Schmidt holds a doctorate in human sciences and has a degree in business administration and a degree in psychology. He began his career in 1994 as a Marketing Science Executive at BBDO in New York. In 1996 he moved to the BBDO in Düsseldorf as Marketing Science Manager and Strategic Planner, and from 1997 to 1999 he held a staff position at BBDO Germany Holding, the largest communications company in Germany. Until 2020, Dr. Axel Schmidt project manager and partner at the management consultancy Batten & Company, which is part of BBDO Germany. Since 2010 Dr. Axel Schmidt works as an expert in family courts. In 2020 he publishes with Prof. em. Dr. Karl Westhoff (University of Dresden) the volume “Interdisciplinary child welfare – empirical results and instruments for legal practice in the case of separation of parents” (with a foreword by Prof. Dr. Bernd von Heintschel-Heinegg, presiding judge of the Bavarian Supreme Court in retirement and chairman Judge of the higher regional court). In addition, he works as a lecturer for the training of social pedagogues at the Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences and publishes numerous publications on communication and family court issues.
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Interdisciplinary child welfare
Published by Axel Schmidt in Therapy
Schmidt, A. & Westhoff, K. (2020). Interdisciplinary child welfare: Empirical results for legal practice in the case of separation of parents. Baden-Baden: Nomos. With a foreword by Prof. Dr. Bernd von Heintschel-Heinegg (retired presiding judge of the Bavarian Supreme Court and retired presiding judge of the Munich Higher Regional Court for State Security).
This volume closes the gap between norms, jurisprudential interpretations and empirical results from the human sciences that are capable of reaching a consensus to concretise the indefinite legal concept of child welfare. The first part of the book presents the legal basis and the judgments of the Federal Constitutional Court and the Federal Court of Justice for the welfare of the child; they are the framework for the second, larger part, which presents the empirical facts from the human sciences in a comprehensible and well-structured way. The normative determination and case-related interpretation of the child’s best interests can only succeed if knowledge is used that relates to the social reality of the child, i.e. psychological, educational and sociological knowledge. The human sciences provide a value system that corresponds to the legal decision-making criteria and thus a yardstick for assessing the best interests of the child in individual cases and placing the decision-making on a fact-based basis. The human-scientific content presented here, which is used to fill the legal concept of the best interests of the child, withstands the legal point of view and can therefore be used by lawyers in order to guarantee legal security. This interdisciplinary approach of a human-scientific commentary on the legal child welfare criteria can be made available as a working aid to the following target groups: family judges, procedural counselors, contact nurses, supplementary carers, experts, mediators, youth welfare officers, lawyers, politicians, parents.
