Law of the person, the family and private life
This field of research focuses on the legal topics of marriage, family, filiation, protection of adults, caregiving and privacy. In order to clarify the conditions and conditionality of current developments in family law, we subject the field’s prevailing trends, guiding principles and concepts to interdisciplinary and comparative analysis.
In particular, the aim is to better understand the specific arrangements existing amongst legal actors and society as well as the interplay of dogma, discourse and interpretation – for it is only through a genuine appreciation of the present that a meaningful prediction of the future becomes possible.
Research Fields
More than almost any other area of law, family law is perceived as a non-static body of law. Today's family law is flexible and evolving. It is our desire to identify the possible patterns and mechanisms of ongoing developments.
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Personhood, privacy, and private life are among the central guarantees of today's private law. Behind these legal concepts lie fundamental understandings and a wealth of implicit assumptions about just what constitutes personhood, privacy, and private life. We are striving to make these understandings and assumptions visible and to explore them.
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In order to understand how and why certain societies construct certain legal concepts regarding personhood, family and private life, legal research must also be willing to employ extra-legal lines of inquiry. Our aim is to measure the potential of extra-legal methods and interpretative models for family law research, considering, for example, discourse research, family sociology, modernization theory, and comparative study.
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Event Series
Gegenwartsdebatten (Current Debates) is an event series in which we throw open the doors of the Institute to non-legal perspectives on the Institute's research areas. Gegenwartsdebatten invites presentations from outstanding scholars in the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities. Events in this series are open to the public.
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“Family Law At Four” gives Institute staff members and guest speakers the opportunity to present their research on current family law issues, always at 4 pm. The event series is aimed at researchers and practitioners having an interest in family law.
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National and international guests speak on the state, development and future of the legal landscape concerning the human-animal relationship. It is the series’ aim to build bridges – between national and international lines of discourse, between animal rights and animal welfare law, between animal rights and rights of nature, between legal scholarship and the natural sciences and civil society.
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