Katharina Isabel Schmidt

Head of the Minerva Fast Track Research Group “Artificial Justice"

Main Fields of Research

Modern German legal history; global, transnational, and comparative legal history; history of science and knowledge-production; cultural history; intellectual history; comparative law; legal sociology and anthropology; critical legal theory; law and sexuality.

Vita

Katharina Isabel Schmidt is Leader of the Minerva Fast Track Research Group “Artificial Justice.” In this capacity, she heads a team of experts on law, logic, computer science, technology, and the humanities. In her research, Katharina explores the fundamental tension between animation and automation in law. Her first monograph, German Jurists and the Search for Life in Law, traces legal modernism’s long history from 1900 all the way to the Third Reich. In doing so, Katharina pays particular attention to early twentieth-century yearnings for more “human” judges, judges, that is to say, who worked with their hearts, not their minds. Her second book recovers the early history of legal information science against the backdrop of “human failure” under the Nazis, the rise of legal cybernetics in the Soviet Union, and socio-political unrest around 1968. Katharina has training in both law and history, holding degrees from University College London, the University of Cologne, the University of Oxford, the Yale Law School, and Princeton University. She is also a junior fellow at the Hamburg Academy of Sciences.

Education

JSD (Law), Yale Law School, in progress.
PhD (History), Princeton University, September 2021.
MA (History), Princeton University, May 2017.
LL.M (Law), Yale Law School, May 2013.
BCL (Law), Oxford University, July 2011.
LL.B (Law), University College London, August 2010.
Baccalaureus Legum (Law), University of Cologne, August 2010.