Anne Röthel takes over as chair of Max Planck Law
As of 1 October 2025, Institute Director Anne Röthel will be taking over the chair of the Max Planck Law academic network. With this step, she is succeeding Stefan Vogenauer, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt and chair of the network since its inception.
(from left: Dr Niels P Petersson, Dr Annika Hampel, Daniela Dora, Prof Dr Anne Röthel, Dr Zeynep Yazıcı Çağlar, Dr Gilbert Leung)
The Hamburg Institute is one of nine Max Planck Institutes engaged in legal research. Within the Max Planck Society, these are the only institutes forming a cluster in the areas of the humanities and social sciences. In 2019, Max Planck Law was established with the goal of intensifying cooperative efforts and strengthening the inter-institutional support provided to early career researchers. With over 400 scholars, Max Planck Law operates the world’s largest program for doctoral and postdoctoral research in law. It includes seminars and workshops, a career development program, international exchanges with leading law schools, and an international fellowship program that draws top-level researchers into the network. In addition, the program supports doctoral and post-doctoral research initiatives and holds an annual scholarly conference.
Prof Dr Anne Röthel studied law and political science at the Universities of Cologne and Clermont-Ferrand. In 2003 she completed her habilitation at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg. From 2004 until 2023 she held the Chair of Civil Law, European and Private International Law at Bucerius Law School. She has since 2010 been annually invited to serve as guest professor at the Université Paris Panthéon-Assas; additional research stays have led her to Oxford and Kyoto. In 2024 she was appointed as a Director at the Institute. She is a co-editor of the journal FamRZ - Zeitschrift für das gesamte Familienrecht; amongst other entities, she is a member of the Association of German Jurists (Deutscher Juristentag), the German Section of the International Commission of Jurists, and the Working Group for Legal Studies and Contemporary History at the Academy of Science and Literature in Mainz. In 2025 she was inducted into the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Lower Saxony.
Image: © Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law