Jennifer Trinks awarded Habilitation by Bucerius Law School

Jennifer Trinks, senior research fellow at the Institute, successfully completed her post-doctoral studies (Habilitation) at Bucerius Law School and was awarded her lecture qualification for the subjects of civil law, commercial law, company law, capital markets law, and comparative law.

In her post-doctoral thesis (Habilitationsschrift), Trinks examines judicial discretion in business law. The study analyses how courts in other legal systems implement their mandate to find an adequate remedy in the individual case when a specific outcome has not been prescribed by the legislator. On the one hand, she explains the procedural framework for the exercise of discretion by courts. On the other hand, she compares the legislative mandate and concrete outcomes in respect of two particular scenarios: shareholder conflicts in closed companies in Germany, the USA, and Switzerland; and the amount to be paid by directors to the corporation in cases of wrongful trading in Germany, England, and Spain. From this, she derives guidelines for how judicial discretion could contribute to the resolution of complex conflicts also in German law. At the oral defence of her thesis (Habilitationskolloquium), Trinks presented journalism’s role in capital markets in light of Art. 21 of the Market Abuse Regulation, oscillating between capital market efficiency and media freedom.

Priv.-Doz. Dr. Jennifer Trinks, LL.M. (Yale) studied law at LMU Munich and the Université Panthéon-Assas (Paris II). In 2011, she sat for the first state law exam in Munich and also received the Maîtrise en droit (Paris II). She passed the second state law exam in Hamburg in 2013 and began working as a staff member at the Institute. In 2017, she earned her LL.M at Yale Law School, and, in 2020, she received her doctoral degree from Bucerius Law School. Her dissertation was honoured with the Helmut Schippel Award of the Deutsche Notarrechtliche Vereinigung (German Notarial Law Association) as well as with the Ernst Rabel Award of the Gesellschaft für Rechtsvergleichung (Association of Private Law). In the summer semester 2025 Trinks served as acting professor of civil law, economic law, and banking law at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main (Chair of Prof. Dr. Katja Langenbucher).