German legal tradition assumes it knows what property is. But behind a definition that has stood unchanged in the Civil Code since 1900, the concept has travelled a very long way. In a recent legal column in Merkur, our Director Marietta Auer argues that the concept has slipped, almost unnoticed, out of private law and into public law.

The University of São Paulo (USP) and the Max Planck Society will establish the Max Planck-USP Law Center—Normativity Regimes for Societies in Transformation, with offices in São Paulo and at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt. Scheduled to begin operations in January 2027, the new Center will be dedicated to the study of transformations in law and other forms of normativity from a global perspective, bringing together researchers from Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa.

Daniel Damler seeks the normative where it does not present itself as law, where it becomes spatial and visual. For his research projects, he looks beyond the executive and supervisory boardrooms to examine law in relation to architecture, and interprets the fictional world of Gotham City as a visual symbol of a state of emergency. His latest project focuses on Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478–1557), chronicler of the Conquista, courtier and notary, whom Alexander von Humboldt revered as the Pliny of the New World. Damler examines his life and work, in addition to his programmatic struggle for truth and reality. We asked him what determines whether an unconventional subject is suitable for legal history, and what does a research project gain by publishing its findings as a novel.