Vibrant geometric kaleidoscope pattern in blue, orange, and yellow tones, forming a symmetrical spiral.

Law Through Many Lenses

Law unfolds most vividly when it is approached through a spectrum of creative and intellectual perspectives. Across our institute, current research shows how legal thinking grows when it enters into dialogue with memory, images, sound, taste and lived experience. These approaches enrich classical legal analysis by bringing forward layers of normativity that remain hidden when attention rests on formal rules alone.

Illustration of laborers in a field and individuals at a hacienda, highlighting work in 189

A Reﬂection on the Power of Graphic Narratives

Graphic and transmedia storytelling reveals how communities craft new visions of law and social change. Karla Luzmer Escobar Hernández examines the rise of Colombian peasant and indigenous movements and the collaborative practices that shaped their political strategies. Her work brings forward alternative legal narratives grounded in shared memory, collective research, and historical imagination. Her article in Rechtsgeschichte develops this perspective through Camino y Ruptura, a graphic history that treats time as a central political force in Indigenous legal practice.

Medical illustration of a human mouth opened in cross-section. Visible are the teeth, tongue, palate, muscles, nerve bundles, and surrounding tissues in highly detailed anatomical depiction. The structures are color-highlighted and resemble a historical anatomical drawing.

Culinary Normativity

Recipes and cookbooks form a subtle system of norms that shapes everyday behavior. This insight marks the starting point of Daniel Damler’s project. He explores how culinary rules can guide choices more effectively than direct governmental action and why societies have long relied on them to regulate essential aspects of life. His project traces how, in pre modern contexts, recipes offered excluded groups a pathway to influence communal practices. It then links these historical patterns to today’s crowdsourcing methods, showing how participatory rulemaking might strengthen trust in political institutions.

Book "Recht harmonisch" by Marietta Auer, placed beside an open laptop in a warm-toned room.

When Legal Thinking Hits the Right Note

The ties between law and music are far richer than they first appear. Harmonies, rhythms and proportions have long served as models for order in society. In her new book, our Director Marietta Auer explores this history under the title Recht harmonisch. Musikalisches Ordnungsdenken in Recht und Staat seit der Antike. Starting from Pythagoras’ theory of harmony, Auer shows how musical ideas have shaped legal and political order from antiquity to the present.

Visitor with red shawl and boots admiring a framed painting on a blue wall in a museum setting.

How Images Trace Power

Images can reveal how power moves through a society, and Fabian Steinhauer’s project uses this insight to open a new view on Aby Warburg as an unexpected voice in modern legal thought. By tracing Warburg’s cultural techniques and his atlas panels on the Lateran Treaties, the project uncovers a legal landscape shaped by symbolic acts, shifting tensions and visual reasoning. Steinhauer shows how gestures, rituals and forms of symbolic distance generate legal meaning at a moment when modernity was redefining its foundations.

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Mission Statement

We provide a forum for reflecting on law.
We explore its theory and history in a comparative and global perspective.
We address societal challenges by contributing to a deeper understanding of law.

Multidisciplinary Theory of Law

Department Marietta Auer

Historical Regimes of Normativity

Department Thomas Duve

European and Comparative Legal History

Department Stefan Vogenauer

The hidden heritage of the European Union: the legacy of the law of the League of Nations

Max Planck Research Group | Michel Erpelding

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News

Special map of the Samoa Islands with plans of the ports of Apia and Saluafata. Public domain

Family law and colonial governance in German Samoa

December 08, 2025

Germany’s colonial past is again at the center of public debate. Volume 27 of the Global Perspectives on Legal History offers a focused contribution: a study of how the German administration in Samoa (1900–1914) used family law as a tool of colonial governance. Examining marriage, divorce, citizenship, legitimacy, and maintenance, Julia Hütten shows how rules on the most intimate matters became instruments of colonial power and a mirror for ideas of ‘Germanness’.

Excerpt from the signature line of a Toledo-Castilian will (1129)

The Islamic heritage of Spanish inheritance law

January 12, 2026

In volume 350 of the Studies in European Legal History, Tim Knoche examines the legal term albacea of the Spanish Código Civil, as the result of a multi-stage legal reception, from the Islamic waṣī through the Mozarabic and Castilian documentary practice of Toledo to its internal Castilian spread, exemplified by late medieval document practice in Christian-dominated Seville.

A complex affair – German legal science around 1900

December 18, 2025

Volume 332 of the Studien zur europäischen Rechtsgeschichte explores the growing differentiation of German legal science around 1900. It traces the emergence of new subdisciplines, shifting self-understandings within established fields, and lively debates in legal philosophy, theory, and sociology, highlighting the conditions under which a plural and differentiated jurisprudence took shape.