Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory

MAXminds Mentorship initiative to aid affected university students in their careers

Marietta Auer and Iain Couzin are awarded the Leibniz Prize 2022 of the German Research Foundation DFG

An interview with Raquel Sirotti, doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute For European Legal History, about the environmental policies of the Bolsonaro government

The battle for women’s rights in Brazil is entering a new round

How clerics used simple rulebooks to establish the new legal order in Spanish America

Democracy can be abolished through democratic means. This lesson from the Weimar Republic has not seemed as relevant as it does today for several decades. To what extent can laws protect democracy, and where are their limitations? Researchers from the Max Planck Law network explore the need for statutory regulations and how they function.

Luiz Gama, first a slave himself, then a lawyer, liberated hundreds of people from slavery. But does anyone still know him today? Bruno Rodrigues de Lima, scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, is keeping his memory alive. As the young lawyer from Brazil says, the human rights activist’s work is anything but done.

For the past 70 years, the German Basic Law has guaranteed the independence of judges, whose decisions are “subject only to the law.” But aren’t there other influences at play? Legal scholars Konrad Duden from the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg and Jasper Kunstreich from the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt am Main have researched this question and come up with some astonishing answers.

The Europeans have plenty of experience of dealing with crises. If we take a look at the history of the community of European states, one thing becomes clear: more or less heated controversies have been a regular occurrence over the decades. However, it has always been possible to find strategies for overcoming them, as the team headed by Stefan Vogenauer at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt/Main is finding out in the course of its research. During the process, the researchers have also gained new insights into the current state of the European Union.

The Spanish Conquistadors found it surprisingly easy to conquer the New World. However, it required more than violence and cruelty to rule the territory. A team of researchers headed by Thomas Duve at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History is investigating the media through which the Spanish crown consolidated its dominion. Meanwhile, an international research group led by Carolin Behrmann at the Max Planck Institute for Art History in Florence is studying the importance of images in the consolidation and legitimation of law with a focus on Early Modern European history.

The world of work is full of rules. In Germany, these are usually equated with “labour law”, consisting mainly of state legislation interpreted and developed by state courts. The history of labour, however, shows that its normative order largely arose out of non-state rules. It includes not only collective bargaining agreements but also a plethora of other sets of rules specific to an individual company, a particular economic sector or a region. Our project aims to create a digital collection of these norms and to reconstruct the normative order of the world of work beyond statutory law.

This project investigated the history of legal scholarship within the Max Planck Society. Law-related institutes had been established in its predecessor organization as early as the 1920s. They combined scholarship in comparative law with elements of policy advice. By the 1960s, a veritable cluster of law-related institutes had emerged; it came to reflect nearly all aspects of legal scholarship and was able to keep adding new institutes and departments. Today it is the only such cluster of thematically closely connected institutes within the humanities and social sciences section.

Researchers can become heroes, and not just when their expertise is in high demand and they attain a level of notoriety through media attention. To this day, the jurist Eugen Ehrlich is still viewed as a role model and guiding figure in many senses: while some take him to be the ‘founder of legal sociology’, others see him as the ‘forefather of legal pluralism’. For Ralf Seinecke, however, these images of the heroes of science should be taken with caution. While they are certainly important and groundbreaking figures, these picture or images also elude the categories of true and false.

The research project Studies in the Contract Laws of Asia provides the first thorough overview of the laws of contract in 14 jurisdictions stretching from India in the West to Japan in the East. In their entirety, these account for nearly half of the world’s population and much of its economic power. Coordinated by the University of Oxford and the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, the project involves some 150 legal scholars from all over Asia and is thus one of the most comprehensive contemporary projects in comparative law.

The existential challenges currently facing the world – climate change, migrations, pandemics – can only be met through global cooperation. But are we able to agree on global rules? – The study of history reveals the fundamentals of an international language of law on which we can draw. Centuries-long encounters between peoples from all over the world, often tragic and characterized by violence and asymmetries, resulted in processes of cultural translation and localization of normative knowledge. The aim of the project “Glocalizing Normativities” is to better understand these mechanisms.