Mediathek

Guest lecture as part of the series “Private Law in Context Across Asia and North Africa” on 15 December 2025. more

Guest lecture as part of the series “Hamburg Forum on Comparative Animal Law” on 9 December 2025. more

Guest lecture as part of the series “Hamburg Forum on Comparative Animal Law” on September 3, 2025. more

Guest lecture as part of the series “Hamburg Forum on Comparative Animal Law” on July 17, 2025. more

Guest lecture as part of the series “Hamburg Forum on Comparative Animal Law” on May 22, 2025. more

Guest lecture as part of our series “Hamburg Forum on Comparative Animal Law” on February 6, 2025. more

Guest lecture as part of the series “Arab and Islamic Law to Go” on 4 February 2025. more

Guest lecture as part of the series “Afternoon Talks on Islamic Law” on 5 November 2024. more

Conference on 5 September 2024. more

Guest lecture as part of the series “Hamburg Forum on Comparative Animal Law” on May 2, 2024. more

Guest lecture as part of the series “Hamburg Forum on Comparative Animal Law” on May 2, 2024. more

Guest lecture as part of the series “Afternoon Talks on Islamic Law” on 25 April 2024. more

Anne Röthel was appointed as Director of the Institute as of 1 January 2024. On the occasion of her induction on 18 April 2024, she presented her research agenda in her inaugural lecture. more

Guest lecture as part of the series “Afternoon Talks on Islamic Law” on 22 February 2024. more

Guest lecture as part of our series “Afternoon Talks on Islamic Law” on 30 November 2023. more

Around 40 international legal scholars and practitioners came together at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law from 4-8 July 2023 for the Decolonial Comparative Law Summer School to discuss the various contexts of as well as the methodological approaches to decolonial comparative law. more

Shéhérazade Elyazidi analyzes at Latest Thinking the interplay between the Kurdish-Iraqi national identity and the 2008 reform of Iraq’s Personal Status Law. more

Meet some of the panelists of the international conference “Succession in Islamic Law”, which will take place at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law on 30 and 31 March 2023. more

Virtual roundtable as part of the series Russia's aggression against Ukraine: Conversations on law and policy implications for Japan and Germany on 11 January 2023. more

Guest lecture as part of our series “Afternoon Talks on Islamic Law” on 8 December 2022. more

In 2015, Scarlet Bishara made history as the first female church court judge in an Arab country, serving in the Evangelical Lutheran Church Court of Jordan and the Holy Land in Bethlehem. In this episode of Minority Law to Go, she and host Dörthe Engelcke discuss the unique role of church courts in Palestine, the landmark 2015 family law reform that introduced equal inheritance rights for men and women, and her continuing advocacy for gender justice and equality. more

In this episode of Minority Law To Go, host Dörthe Engelcke speaks with Gianluca Parolin, professor of law at the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilizations at Aga Khan University in London. Together, they explore the struggle of Egyptian Christians to gain autonomy in inheritance law, the promises and limits of Article 3 of the 2012 Constitution, and the landmark 2024 Court of Cassation ruling that highlights the boundaries of legal pluralism. more

In the first episode of the new podcast mini-series Minority Law To Go, host Dörthe Engelcke speaks with Maya Mikdashi, Associate Professor at Rutgers University and author of the seminal book Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon. Together, they unpack the concept of “sextarianism”, exploring how Lebanon’s confessional system governs bodies, gender and family relations. more

During the years that it was in power, the Nazi regime made far-reaching changes to German civil law, especially family law. In the Max Planck Lawcast, Lara Bucholski, former Research Associate at the Institute, details how these civil law changes serve as proof that law is rarely truly neutral. more

In the Max Planck Lawcast, Jan Peter Schmidt, Head of the Centre of Expertise for the Application of Foreign Law, discusses the long-standing tradition that the Institute has of providing expert opinions on foreign law for German courts. more

In the Max Planck Lawcast, Nadjma Yassari, head of the Research Group 'Changes in God’s Law', explains how societal beliefs and assumptions on the role of mothers and fathers have led legislatures in Germany and Iran to accept or reject egg donation to overcome infertility. more

Who can save the elderly from the clutches of greedy relatives? In this podcast, Ben Köhler, senior research fellow at the Institute, talks about good and bad wills, tropes of nineteenth-century masculinity, and court decisions that read like family sagas. (in German) more

In the Max Planck Lawcast, Valentin Pinel le Dret, Research Associate at the Institute, talks about the concept of unjust enrichment and the law of obligations. In particular, he addresses the historical dimension of the topic from the perspective of the legal systems of France and England. more

Europe and the U.S. continue to set the standards against which the rest of the world is measured. This is true also when it comes to how the law is conceived. Western structures are in some regards so thoroughly internalized that it can be hard to recognize them – which makes comparative law that much more valuable. Just how the discipline of comparative law can counter colonial ideas and allow for more legal diversity is explained in the podcast by Institute Director Ralf Michaels. (in German) more