Devouring Legal Theory: Anthropophagy and Travelling Legal Ideas
Research Project
My postdoctoral research investigates what happens when legal ideas travel across different legal, cultural and intellectual contexts. The project began with the trajectories of German legal theory in Brazil, particularly the works of Hans Kelsen and Robert Alexy, and has progressively developed into a broader comparative and transregional inquiry.
At the centre of the project is the Brazilian modernist concept of anthropophagy (Antropofagia). It provides a perspective from which to reconsider conventional accounts of how legal knowledge moves between different contexts and to examine travelling legal ideas across distinct intellectual, institutional and cultural environments.
The first stage of the research focused primarily on the relationship between German and Brazilian legal thought. This research resulted, among other outputs, in “Do Legal Theories Travel Freely? Anthropophagy and the Fiction of Interpretive Symmetry” (Max Planck Law Perspectives, 2026) and, together with Ricardo Martins Spíndola Diniz, ‘Devouring Robert Alexy’s Theorie der Grundrechte: Cultural Legal Translation between Brazil and Germany as Anthropophagy’ (RphZ (Rechtsphilosophie: Zeitschrift für Grundlagen des Rechts), 12(1), 2026, pp. 69–88).
During my postdoctoral research at the Max Planck Institute, I was a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Legal Theory at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in Beijing. This research stay expanded the project beyond its initial Germany–Brazil framework, introduced an East Asian dimension, and provided a further Global South context in which to examine the broader applicability of anthropophagy as a decolonial methodological perspective.
The project now brings together trajectories involving Europe, Latin America and East Asia within a transregional framework. Rather than treating one legal tradition as the natural point of departure and others primarily as sites of ‘reception’, this perspective places different legal and intellectual contexts within the same comparative field.
Towards a Methodological Perspective
The current stage of the project explores anthropophagy as a decolonial methodological perspective for comparative law and the study of travelling legal ideas, developed from and tested across Global South contexts.
It engages critically with established approaches to legal movement, including debates conventionally framed in terms of ‘legal transplants’, ‘reception’, and ‘transfer’, and investigates whether anthropophagy may offer a different perspective from which to approach these questions.
Originally developed through research on German legal thought in Brazil, this inquiry has subsequently expanded to China. The comparison of trajectories across Europe, Latin America, and East Asia provides a broader field in which the possibilities and limits of this methodological perspective can be examined.
Collaborative Research
At the Max Planck Institute, this research agenda also developed into collaborative academic activities, including the creation and coordination of ‘Anthropophagy as the Practice of Traveling Laws: Understanding German Legal Theory Elsewhere’, bringing together scholars working on the trajectories of German legal thought in different parts of the world.
The broader transregional dimension also informed the international workshop ‘The Transregional Histories of Sociological Thought in/on Law’, co-organised with Christian Boulanger at the Max Planck Institute in July 2026.