Law in Context – Berlin Research Network on Legal Culture(s)
The Research Network Law in Context, funded by the state of Berlin since October 2009, has been initiated by a small circle of scholars meeting as the Wissenschaftskolleg’s focus group "Constitution Beyond the Nation State" and later as the "Discussion Group on Constitutional Culture".
Law in Context aims at an enhanced re-contextualization of the law among its neighboring disciplines. From a genuinely legal perspective, the research network seeks to initiate new forms of dialogue and to create discursive structures between the law, the humanities and social sciences. This will confront the law and legal scholarship with other disciplines’ concept(s) and perception(s) of law. It builds upon the work and expertise of a group of scholars sharing a joint interest in contextual and contextualized legal knowledge. They represent a broad range of diverse approaches to the law, including gender studies, comparative research, law & literature, critical approaches to international law, administrative sciences, transitional justice, the law of development cooperation, and classical problems of legal philosophy.
The research network responds to the challenges and necessities created by ever-accelerating processes of inter- and trans-nationalization, and seeks to understand the law in its respective and particular cultural contexts. Of crucial importance and central interest is the systematic confrontation of "our" perception(s) of law, its function(s) and specific cultural technique(s) with the approach to the law taken by other regions and non-regional normative regimes like international human rights law or the EU. For the research network the irritation created by an encounter with the "Other" will not be tamed, functionalized or pressed too easily into the often narrowly-framed perspective of comparative legal praxis, which prematurely assumes a common tertium comparationis.
Central among the research tools to be used is the modification of research questions in interdisciplinary discourse, be it in local, national or transregional network structures and constellations. A crucial element of the discursive structures to be institutionalized in an incremental step-by-step process is the establishment of a postdoctoral fellowship program, enabling scholars in an early stage of their careers to spend an academic year in Berlin and to contextualize themselves and their work in a new research environment.
Contact:
Alexandra Kemmerer
Law in Context
Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin
Institute for Advanced Study
Wallotstr. 19
D-14193 Berlin
Tel +49 30 89001-267
Fax +49 30 89001-100
E-mail