Denise Wiedemann awarded Habilitation by Bucerius Law School

Denise Wiedemann, senior research fellow and head of the Institute’s Centre of Expertise on Latin America successfully completed her post-doctoral studies (Habilitation) at Bucerius Law School in the 2025 Fall Trimester. She was awarded her lecture qualification for the subjects of civil law, private international law, civil procedure law, and comparative law.

In her postdoctoral thesis, Denise Wiedemann examines the individual and social meanings of housing, considering how these are reflected in succession law and matrimonial property law. She combines insights from social history and social psychology on the changing meaning of housing with a depiction of legal developments abroad and contrasts them with doctrinal positions in German law. Her study methodically demonstrates how non-legal knowledge can not only be translated into legal policy conclusions or flanked by comparative observations, but also utilized as the basis for exploring deeper questions about doctrinal structures and their driving or persistent forces. Accordingly, the results of her research are also multi-layered. The greater emphasis on individual rather than collective living experiences in the reception processes between social psychology and legal policy has contributed to the fact that no particular significance was (initially) attached to housing in German succession and family law. From a doctrinal perspective, Denise Wiedemann reconstructs the principle of equal treatment of property, which guides both succession and family law allocations and distributions.

PD Dr. Denise Wiedemann studied law in Leipzig, comparative law and European law in Lisbon, and administration of justice in Meißen. In connection with her doctoral project she was a visiting researcher at the Centre de recherche de droit international of the Université Panthéon Assas (Paris II). Her dissertation examining conflict-of-law questions in relation to the cross-border enforcement of judgments was awarded the Otto Hahn Medal as well as the Dr Feldbausch-Stiftung doctoral prize. She has been employed at the Institute since 2015 and in 2017 assumed the leadership of the Centre of Expertise on Latin America. After legal clerkship stations in Brasilia and New York, she sat for the second state exam in law in 2018. In addition to her responsibilities as an Institute research fellow, she was a lecturer at Bucerius Law School as well as the Universities of Hamburg and Leipzig. Among other academic activities, she was a guest researcher and lecturer at the Nordic Centre for Comparative and International Family Law (NORFAM) at Aalborg Universitet (summer semester 2024) and at the Cambridge Family Law Centre on the University of Cambridge (Michaelmas term 2022). In the winter semester 2024/25 and the summer semester 2025 she served as acting professor of civil law and private international law at the University of Leipzig. Presently she is teaching private international law as a guest lecturer at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg.