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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
An Oral History of EU Lawmaking
Drawing on oral history interviews and archival research, Sigfrido Ramírez Pérez reconstructs how the Secretariat of the European Council influenced key areas of EU law. The project aims to record, transcribe and make selected testimonies accessible while providing the analytical framework and source work that guide the interviews. The project invites researchers to engage with a growing body of material that enriches the understanding of supranational governance.
News
Publication series
Rechtsgeschichte – Legal History
mpilhlt Research Paper Series
Studien zur europäischen Rechtsgeschichte
Studien zur Rechtstheorie
methodica – Einführungen in die rechtshistorische Forschung
Max Planck Studies in Global Legal History of the Iberian Worlds
Studien zu Policey, Kriminalitätsgeschichte und Konfliktregulierung
Global Perspectives on Legal History