Chair for Globalisation and Legal Pluralism
The chair’s research deals with globalisation processes in law from a historical perspective. We explore the complex interactions between different legal systems, perceptions and practices, challenging European-centric narratives and examining dynamics of change.
A particular focus of our research is on the processes of legal transformation that posed challenges to many regions outside Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, often requiring a balancing act between the expansion of European legal ideas and the struggle for sovereignty and self-assertion. We explore the effects of colonialism, semi-colonialism and decolonisation on legal structures and practices, as well as the role of legal pluralism in multi-ethnic societies. A further focus of our research is on the circulation of ideas and practices in the context of National Socialism and fascism, and on legal responses to mass atrocities and crimes against humanity.
Our research therefore contributes to the discourse on the plurality and diversity of legal orders in a globally interconnected world, and bridges the gap between historical and present-day challenges.
Research areas
Globalisation of Law
This research focus is dedicated to the often asymmetrical encounters between different legal orders in an increasingly globalised world. We examine practices of translation and appropriation, as well as dissent and resistance, and explore how dynamics of change are initiated through the complex interactions of laws, institutions, ideas and actors.
Contemporary Legal History
Our research in this area concentrates especially on National Socialism and its aftermath. We pursue transnational comparative perspectives and examine the conditions that facilitated the complicity of jurists in injustice and lawlessness, as well as the resulting implications.
Transitional Justice (TJ)
In this research area, we study legal and societal processes of reckoning with a past marked by severe human rights violations. Our research approach highlights the interactions between global developments and local practices of TJ, scrutinising standardised models from a critical, interdisciplinary perspective.
Research projects
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Japan, China and the Ottoman Empire faced massive pressure to adapt their legal systems to Western standards. The project examined the transformation processes initiated by the translation of Western law and developed approaches to legal historiography that reflect the complex dynamics of change and the global connections involved.
The project is a comparative study of how legal scholars in Germany and Japan positioned themselves between 1930 and 1955 under authoritarian regimes, and how jurisprudence contributed to the ideological transformation of law. It also analyses the role of legal scholarship in the democratic transition after 1945.
Doctoral theses completed by team members
In a micro-historical study, Sebastian Frik demonstrates that “black” actors in interwar Paris used the vocabulary of human rights as a tool to substantiate their political demands for freedom with legal arguments. Their new, hybridised understanding of global human rights disrupted European conceptions of law.
