(Post-)Colonial History of Law in Germany
In June 2026, Tanja Herklotz's dissertation will be published by Hart Publishing. The book looks at eight national campaigns for law reform waged by the protagonists of the Indian women's movement between the 1970s and today, addressing sexual assault, domestic violence, and family law, among other issues. Feminist Legal Activism in India will be available open access.
As part of a focus issue on German Law under (Post)Colonialism, Gwinyai Machona published an article on the legal history of German colonial corporations in Kritische Justiz (Issue 2, 2025).
Laura Anna Klein's dissertation Reproduktive Freiheiten [Reproductive Freedoms] was awarded the Marie-Elisabeth-Lüders-Wissenschaftspreis for the year 2025. In her book, Klein argues that it is time for a new conception of
fundamental rights that takes interdisciplinary findings into consideration and incorporates human rights guarantees.
In November 2024, Gwinyai Machona published an article on the Ilbert Bill controversy of 1882 in the Law and History Review of the American Society of Legal History. The article highlights – using the debates over the Ilbert Bill – the constitutive character of racial discrimination for British colonialism.
Together with Isabel Feichtner (Würzburg) and Jochen von Bernstorff (Tübingen), Philipp Dann has published an edited volume on the legal history of German colonialism.
Maxim Bönnemann's dissertation has been published by Mohr Siebeck. The book embeds the triumph of the special economic zone within a particular discourse in development economics and uses the example of India to demonstrate the central role of the law. Bönnemann received the Faculty of Law's award for the best dissertation in 2022.