Cooperations

The Institute (mpilhlt) and its researchers are involved in a variety of national and international collaborations. Most of these are rather informal and related to individual research projects ranging from joint conferences, seminars, and workshops to co-authorship and co-editorship.

The mpilhlt is one of nine Max Planck Institutes that conduct legal research and together form the Max Planck Law Network. The team coordinating Max Planck Law, under the direction of Stefan Vogenauer, is situated at the mpilhlt. We are a member of the Frankfurt Alliance, which brings together 16 non-university research institutes and Goethe University in the metropolitan area of Frankfurt.

Additionally, the Institute maintains several institutional partnerships, particularly for the implementation of third-party funded projects. In Frankfurt, it collaborates closely with the Department of Law and the Historical Seminar at the Goethe University Frankfurt. It is also involved in the Graduate School ‘Organizing Architectures’, which took up its work in November 2024. Together with the Hugo Sinzheimer Institute (HSI), researchers from the mpilhlt have launched an initiative to promote the history of labour law. There are also close ties to the University of Giessen (JLU) through the joint appointment of Director Marietta Auer, who holds the Chair in Private Law and International and Interdisciplinary Foundations of Law, and the Max Planck Fellow Group led by Thorsten Keiser, who is the Chair in Civil Law and Legal History at JLU.

Another important partner in the Rhine-Main area is the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz. Moreover, the Institute has a research group as part of the Excellence Cluster ‘Beyond Slavery and Freedom’ at the University of Bonn.

The departments and research groups share a comparative and global perspective on the history and theory of law, and this approach has led to close collaborations with researchers and institutions within and beyond Europe. The focus here is particularly on the regions and countries that were subject to the power and influence zones of the Iberian monarchies or the former British Empire.

Two Max Planck partner groups link the research of the mpilhlt with the Università di Trento and the China University of Political Science and Law (CUPL) in Beijing, with a third group in preparation with the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.

Research on the legal history of the European Union is carried out with the support of European institutions such as the Historical Archive of the European Union, the European Court of Justice, the European Commission, and the European Union Liaison Committee of Historians. Together with the Max Weber Foundation and the Werner Reimers Foundation, the mpilhlt has initiated the programme ‘China – Norms, Ideas, Practices’.