Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Prof. Dr. Philipp Dann

Philipp Dann is Professor at Humboldt University Berlin, where he holds the Chair in Public and Comparative Law and is currently serving as Dean of the Faculty of Law. Educated at Humboldt University of Berlin and the Kammergericht (first and second state exam), Frankfurt University (PhD and habilitation) and Harvard Law School (Master), he has been a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Public Law in Heidelberg, a visiting researcher at New York University (Emile Noel Fellow), the Georgetown Law Center in Washington D.C. and the National Law School Bangalore.

He has published 3 monographs, 10 conceptualized edited volumes and well over 50 peer-reviewed articles in German and in English and is the editor-in-chief of the quarterly journal “World Comparative Law”. Dann also advised governments and other parties on constitutional matters and questions of law and development. He taught at various universities in Germany, India and France and in 2024 was invited to conduct the Masterclass at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg.

Dann works in international, comparative, German and European public law, using political and legal theory, historical and empirical perspectives. Main sites of his research are the law of democracy, federalism, development finance and temporality. An overarching interest in his works is the role of law in the encounters and entanglements between South and North. Through his writings and collaborative research projects he has given new impetus to the question of how law has shaped, has been shaped and is shaping global relations especially in a South-North perspective and not least through colonialism and its legacies. He is currently exploring the potentials (and pitfalls) for re-imagining public law and its scholarship in the 21^st century through the colonial lens and wondering how to rethink public law and the role of legal scholarship in a truly global way mindful of the broader legacies of modernity and colonialism.

A hallmark of Dann’s academic activities are collaborations, often in transnational formats. He is the coordinator of the World Comparative Law Network and of the law and politics stream in the Indian European Advanced Research Network (IEARN), co-speaker of the German branch of ICON-S, the co-founder of the Law and Development Research Network (LDRN) and a principal investigator at the research cluster ‘Contestations of the Liberal Script’ (SCRIPTS). In 2025, he sets up the Center of Advanced Studies ‘Reflexive Globalization and the Law: Colonial Legacies and their implications in the 21^st century’ (ReGlo.Law) at Humboldt University.

Contact

Email: philipp.dann@hu-berlin.de

Selected Publications

A full list of publications is available here.

Monographs

• „The Law of Development Cooperation. A comparative analysis of World Bank, EU and Germany“, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2013, 592 pages
• „Parlamente im Exekutivföderalismus. Eine Studie zum Verhältnis von föderaler Ordnung und parlamentarischer Demokratie in der Europäischen Union“, Heidelberg 2004, 474 pages (This is my German-language PhD thesis. Its central thoughts in English can be found in: „Looking through the federal lens: The semi-parliamentary democracy of the EU", Jean Monnet Working Paper No. 5/2002, 50 pages.)

Edited volumes (selection)

• „The Southern turn and its Northern Implications: Colonial Legacies in Comparative Constitutional Law“, Comparative Constitutional Studies 1 (2023)
• „The Law of Development“, in: Ruth Buchanan, Luis Eslava, Sundhya Pahuja (eds.), Oxford Handbook of International Law and Development (2023) 
• „Comparing Constitutional Democracy in the European Union and India: An Introduction“, in: Arun Thiruvengadam and Philipp Dann (Hrsg.), Democratic Constitutionalism in India and the European Union: Comparing the Law of Democracy in Continental Polities, Cheltenham 2021, pp. 1-41 (together with Arun Thiruvengadam)
• „The World Bank’s Environmental and Social Safeguards and the Evolution of Global Order“, Leiden Journal of International Law (2019) (together with Michael Riegner)
• „Political Institutions of the EU“, in: v. Bogdandy / Bast (eds.), Principles of European Constitutional Law, 2010, pp. 237-274
• „The Internationalized Pouvoir Constituant – Constitution-Making Under External Influence in Iraq, Sudan and East Timor“, Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law 10 (2006), pp. 423-463 (together with Zaid Al-Ali)
• „Looking through the federal lens: The semi-parliamentary democracy of the EU“, Jean Monnet Working Paper No. 5/2002, 50 S.