Research Interests
Thomas Duve researches legal history from a global perspective. He explores how knowledge of normativity was produced in the early modern period taking into account the entanglements between the secular and religious normative spheres, especially in the Iberian worlds. His work also focuses on the use of the past in law, on colonial law, and on the methods of legal history and of comparative law.
Project Management
Thomas Duve, Fupeng Li, Haochen Ku, Min Li
more
Thomas Duve, Sandra Michelle Röseler
more
Thomas Duve, Luisa Stella Coutinho, Rômulo da Silva Ehalt, Fupeng Li, Raquel R. Sirotti, Luca Alexander von Bogdandy, Karolyne Mendes Mendonça Moreira, Haochen Ku, Mauro Armando Adelino Manhanguele, Karoline Marques Machado, Vanessa Massuchetto, Sandra Michelle Röseler, Julia Hütten, Christian Pogies, Xinran Liu
more
Thomas Duve, Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, Christiane U. Birr, José Luis Egío García, Andreas Wagner, Polina Solonets
more
Thomas Duve, Raquel Razente Sirotti, Karolyne Mendes Mendonça Moreira
more
Thomas Duve, María del Pilar Mejía Quiroga, Ana Isabel Soler Otte, Nádia dos Santos Aguiar
more
Thomas Duve, Natalie Cobo
more
Thomas Duve, Julia Hütten, Nádia dos Santos Aguiar, Alexandra Wielandt
more
Research Projects
Armando Guevara Gil, Thomas Duve
more
Thomas Duve, Manuela Bragagnolo, Polina Solonets, Christiane U. Birr, Fupeng Li
more
Completed Projects
Thomas Duve, Tamar Herzog
more
Thomas Duve, Ana Isabel Soler Otte, Juan Belda Plans
more
Thomas Duve, José Luis Egío García
more
Thomas Duve, Mariana Dias Paes, Karla Luzmer Escobar Hernández, Massimo Meccarelli, Pamela Cacciavillani
more
Show more
Curriculum Vitae
Thomas Duve was born in Hamburg in 1967. After compulsory military service and an apprenticeship in a bank, he studied at the universities of Heidelberg, Buenos Aires and Munich. He passed the two German State Examinations in Law at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and the Universität Hamburg, respectively, receiving his practical training in Hamburg. He then worked at the Faculty of Law in Munich, first as a faculty assistant, then as an assistant professor, and 2004–2005 as the leader of a subproject in the Collaborative Research Centre Pluralization and Authority in the Early Modern Age funded by the DFG (CRC 573). He was awarded his doctorate in 1997 and in 2005 gained his professorial qualification (Habilitation) for civil law, German legal history, historical comparative law, canon law and philosophy of law. Between 2005 and 2009, he was Professor of Legal History with a so-called dedicación especial en investigación at the Faculty of Law and Professor of the History of Canon Law at the Faculty of Canon Law of the Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina (UCA), as well as a member of the board of directors of the Instituto de Investigaciones de Historia del Derecho, Buenos Aires. He became a Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society in 2009, and since 2010 has been a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory (formerly Max Planck Institute for European Legal History) as well as Professor for Comparative Legal History at the Faculty of Law of the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt.
Thomas Duve is the (co-)editor of numerous academic journals and publications series, and a member of many scholarly associations, scientific academies and research cooperations (for details, see his full CV).
Publications (Selection, 2018-2025)
Thomas DuveEl Derecho canónico en la temprana Edad Moderna y la historia global, Ius Canonicum 65(129), 169–218 (2025).
more
Edited by Thomas Duve and Tamar Herzog, translated by Gustavo Silveira Siqueira and Júlia MuinhosPortuguese translation of “The Cambridge History of Latin American Law in Global Perspective” (CUP, 2024).
more
Edited by Thomas Duve and Tamar Herzog
more
Band 6, Thomas Duve und José Luis Egío
more
Rechtsgeschichte - Legal History Rg 29 (2021) 41-68
more
Volume 2, Thomas Duve, José Luis Egío, Christiane Birr (eds.)
more
Thomas Duve in: Comparative Legal History (2020)
more
Thomas Duve in: JuristenZeitung (JZ), Heft 15-16, Jahrgang 75 (2020), 757-766
more
Max-Planck Studies in Global Legal History of the Iberian Worlds, vol. 1, Edited by Thomas Duve and Otto Danwerth, Brill | Nijhoff, 2020
more
Responding to the Intellectual Challenges of Legal Globalization, translated by Fupeng Li), Peking University Law Journal 31,1 (2019), 21-36.
The American Journal of Comparative Law, Volume 66, Issue 4, 31 December 2018
in: Dubber, Markus/Tomlins, Christopher (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Legal History, Oxford: OUP 2018, pp. 817-837
The School of Salamanca Working Paper Series, 2018, 2
in: Pihlajamäki, Heikki/Dubber, Markus/Godfrey, Mark (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of European Legal History, Oxford: OUP 2018, pp. 115-139
in: Comparative Legal History 6:1 (2018)
in: —/Ruppert, Stefan (eds.), Rechtswissenschaft in der Berliner Republik, Frankfurt am Main/Berlin: suhrkamp, 2018, pp. 67-120
Research Communication
In this video, Thomas Duve analyzes the processes by which normative knowledge is globalized and localized with a specific focus on religious knowledge.
Wer Rechtsgeschichte des Kolonialismus ohne Beteiligung der Betroffenen schreibt, verletzt nicht bloß Empfindlichkeiten. Kooperation ist auch praktisch geboten. Zur Kontroverse zwischen Cengiz Barskanmaz und Alexandra Kemmerer.
Yearbook 2019 Glocalising Normativities
Yearbook 2015 Regulated self-regulation from a legal historical perspective
