Academic Advisory Board

Prof. Dr. José Luis Alonso

University of Zurich

Prof. Dr. iur. José Luis Alonso has held the chair of Roman Law, Legal Papyrology and Private Law at the University of Zurich since 2017. Previously, he held professorships in Roman Law and Ancient History at the University of the Basque Country and the University of Warsaw. He is a member of the Société d'Histoire du Droit and has published various monographs and articles on Roman and Greek legal history. He is currently researching the phenomenon of legal pluralism in antiquity on the basis of papyri.

Prof. Dr. Thomas Duve

Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory

Prof. Dr. Thomas Duve is director of the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory and has been a scientific member of the Max Planck Society since 2009. After his habilitation at the University of Munich, he served as a professor of Legal History and History of Canon Law at the Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina from 2005 to 2009. Since 2010 he has been a professor of Comparative Legal History at the Goethe University Frankfurt. His research interests include the legal history of the Iberian monarchies in the early modern period, as well as global historical perspectives on European legal history.

Prof. Dr. Julia Eckert

University of Bern

Prof. Dr. Julia Eckert has held the chair for Political Anthropology at the Institute for Social Anthropology at the University of Bern since 2009. Previously, she examined the juridification of protest and the globalisation of transnational legal norms as head of the research group ‘Law against the State’ at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale. She specializes in the political anthropology of world society, focussing on changing institutions of democracy and law under conditions of increasing interdependence.

Prof. Dr. Michael Riegner LL.M. (NYU)

University of Erfurt

Prof. Dr. Michael Riegner has held the Assistant Professorship for International Administrative Law and Public International Law at the University of Erfurt since 2021. Previously, he was a research associate at the Humboldt University of Berlin, where he received his doctorate in 2017 with a thesis on the information administrative law of international institutions. His research interests also include human rights protection, law and development, comparative constitutional law and law in the Global South as well as interdisciplinary legal research.  

Prof. Dr. Gerd Schwerhoff

Technische Universität Dresden

Prof. Dr. Gerd Schwerhoff has held the chair of Early Modern History at the TU Dresden since 2000 and is currently speaker of the Collaborative Research Centre 1285 “Invectivity. Constellations and Dynamics of Disparagement”. In 1997 he habilitated at Bielefeld University with a thesis on the phenomenon of blasphemy from theological, legal and social perspectives. His research interests include the history of criminality and deviant behaviour, the history of witch-hunts and public spaces in the early modern period.

Prof. Dr. Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger

Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin

Prof. Dr. Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger is the rector of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Previously, she was professor of Modern History at the University of Münster from 1997 to 2018. She has published widely on early modern history, especially on the constitutional und cultural history of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation and on the exercise of power in the pre-modern era. She has received numerous honours for her research, including the Prize of the Historisches Kolleg, the Leibniz Prize and the Leipzig Book Fair Prize.

Former member of the Academic Advisory Board

Prof. em. Dr. Keebet von Benda-Beckmann (1946–2022)