News
After almost 13 years, the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities "Law as Culture" has reached the end of its maximum term as planned on December 31, 2022, and has finished its work at the Bonner Bogen. We would like to thank all friends and supporters, colleagues and the 130 Fellows from all over the world for their wonderful cooperation in trying to better understand law as culture in the context of globalization.
Please note that the addresses and phone numbers listed on the homepage are no longer valid (with the exception of the phone numbers of Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Werner Gephart, 0228/73-54053, Dr. Stefan Finger, 0228/7354051, and the fax number 0228/73-54054). The former board of directors and management of the Center can still be reached at the following e-mail addresses: dethloff@uni-bonn.de, w.gephart@uni-bonn.de, clemens.albrecht@uni-bonn.de, finger@uni-bonn.de.
News 2023
New publications
In the series "Law as Culture" edited by Werner Gephart, the following volumes have been published by Verlag Vittorio Klostermann (Frankfurt am Main):
Werner Gephart / Daniel Witte (Eds.):
Communities and the(ir) Law, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann (Volume 31 of the series "Law as Culture", edited by Werner Gephart)
Tobias Janz / Jens Gerrit Papenburg (Eds.):
Ästhetische Normativität in der Musik, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann (Volume 33 of the series "Law as Culture", edited by Werner Gephart)
Further publications of the Käte Hamburger Center "Law as Culture" can be found here.
News December 2022
New publications
In the series "Law as Culture" edited by Werner Gephart, the following volumes have been published by Verlag Vittorio Klostermann (Frankfurt am Main):
Katja Spranz:
Tatort Ost - Darstellung von Recht und Unrecht in Fernsehkrimiserien der DDR, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann ((Volume 32 of the series "Law as Culture", edited by Werner Gephart)
Josef Isensee:
Hermeneutik - Studien über den Umgang der Jurisprudenz mit Normtexten im Vergleich zur biblischen Theologie und zur Literaturwissenschaft, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann (Volume 30 of the series "Law as Culture", edited by Werner Gephart)
Jenny Hellmann:
Trauma, Kollektivgefühle und das Recht - Transitional Justice in Argentinien, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann (Volume 29 of the series "Law as Culture", edited by Werner Gephart)
Further publications of the Käte Hamburger Center "Law as Culture" can be found here.
News October 2022
Invitation to the book launch of the new work by Greta Olson
A book written
by Prof. Dr. Greta Olson (Gießen) has just been published which in many respects touches on the central topic of the Center. It is entitled
"From Law and Literature to Legality and Affect"
and published by Oxford University Press. This book, written during Greta Olson's fellowship at the Center (2014 and 2016) and - as the author points out - also inspired by it, extends the experiences of the Law and Literature movement to contemporary issues, for example systematic racism.
The book launch with, among others, Peter Goodrich, Jean Gaaker, Simon Stern and Werner Gephart will take place on 10 October at 6 pm. You can access the conference in the following way:
Please join us on Monday, 10 October, from 6 to 8 PM / 18:00 to 20:00 (UTC+02:00). Everyone is welcome, and there is no need to register beforehand. Join via the following link: https://uni-giessen.webex.com/uni-giessen-en/j.php?MTID=m20a89c33ef370abcbfae8e0e596e6bf7
or Webinar number 2734 594 3859 & password: ygNsY2uSP67
If you have any issues while logging in, please contact Melanie.Kreitler@gcsc.uni-giessen.de
The flyer is available here (PDF).
News September 2022
New publication
Peter Bojanic: In-Statuer
e - Figures of Institutional Building has just been released as the 28th volume of the series “Law as Culture”, edited by Werner Gephart.
Further publications of the Käte Hamburger Center "Law as Culture" can be found here.
Lecture by Werner Gephart at the Université Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne): « Le droit comme fait culturel. Des influences cachées d’Eugen Ehrlich dans les écrits de Max Weber sur le droit ? »
Colloquium « L'actualité de la pensée d'Eugen Ehrlich pour les méthodes empiriques du droit »
Paris, 22-23 September 2022
Even if Max Weber and Eugen Ehrlich differed on a number of major questions of the sociological analysis of law: for example, the concept of law, the role of customary law, the question of the relative autonomy of legal dogmatics or the birth of law from the structures of society, the high degree of agreement remains remarkable in determining what are the important questions of a sociology of law: living law vs. dead dogmatics, popular law vs. juridical law, the juridical determinacy of sociological thought, etc. The lecture « Le droit comme fait culturel. Des influences cachées d’Eugen Ehrlich dans les écrits de Max Weber sur le droit ? » attempts to discuss these questions, not least in view of the high expectations placed in Eugen Ehrlich all over the world - 100 years after his death also in France, after Durkheim had "missed" Eugen Ehrlich, so to speak, and just over likewise 100 years after the death of Max Weber, whose commemorations have tragically just fallen victim to the Corona crisis, after he had already died of the Spanish flu...
New Publications
In the series "Law as Culture" edited by Werner Gephart, the following volumes will soon be published by Verlag Vittorio Klostermann (Frankfurt am Main):
Jure Leko: Anerkennung und Migration - Bleiberechtskämpfe geflüchteter Roma*, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann (Volume 36 of the series "Law as Culture", edited by Werner Gephart)
Raja Sakrani: Paradoxes in Islam and the Ambivalent Structuring of Islamic Legal Cultures, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann (Volume 35 of the series "Law as Culture", edited by Werner Gephart)
Werner Gephart: In Search of the Elementary Forms of Social Life - Law, Culture, and Religion in a Durkheimian Perspective, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann (Volume 34 of the series "Law as Culture", edited by Werner Gephart)
Tobias Janz / Jens Gerrit Papenburg (Eds.): Ästhetische Normativität in der Musik, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann (Volume 33 of the series "Law as Culture", edited by Werner Gephart)
Katja Spranz: Tatort Ost - Darstellung von Recht und Unrecht in Fernsehkrimiserien der DDR, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann (Volume 32 of the series "Law as Culture", edited by Werner Gephart)
Werner Gephart / Daniel Witte (Eds.): Communities and the(ir) Law, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann (Volume 31 of the series "Law as Culture", edited by Werner Gephart)
Josef Isensee: Hermeneutik - Studien über den Umgang der Jurisprudenz mit Normtexten im Vergleich zur biblischen Theologie und zur Literaturwissenschaft, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann (Volume 30 of the series "Law as Culture", edited by Werner Gephart)
Jenny Hellmann: Trauma, Kollektivgefühle und das Recht - Transitional Justice in Argentinien, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann (Volume 29 of the series "Law as Culture", edited by Werner Gephart)
Peter Bojanic: In-Statuere - Figures of Institutional Building, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann (Volume 28 of the series "Law as Culture", edited by Werner Gephart)
News June 2022
Plenary Lecture by Dr. Raja Sakrani
at the 3rd International Congress of PLURIEL "Islam & Otherness" (Video online)
The plenary lecture given by Dr. Raja Sakrani on "The other in Islamic civilization: from the immanence of cultures to divine transcendence" on May 24, 2022 at the 3rd international congress of PLURIEL "Islam & Otherness" at the Université Saint Joseph de Beyrouth is available via the following link:
https://youtu.be/HJjlL0DG0wo
The link was prepared by the PLURIEL platform.
The photos were provided by the organizer "PLURIEL".
News May 2022
Plenary Lecture by Dr. Raja Sakrani
at the 3rd International Congress of PLURIEL "Islam & Otherness"
Dr. Raja Sakrani will give a plenary lecture on "The other in Islamic civilization: from the immanence of cultures to divine transcendence" at the 3rd international congress of PLURIEL "Islam & Otherness" on 24 May 2022. The international conference will take place from 23 to 27 May 2022 at the Université Saint Joseph de Beyrouth and the Université La Sagesse in Beirut. More information on the conference homepage and registration:
https://pluriel.fuce.eu/congres/congress-islam-and-otherness/?lang=en
The conference programme is available here.
News April 2022
Final Conference - The Käte Hamburger Center “Law as Culture”: Reflecting on a Paradigm and a Format of Knowledge (Online Conference)
May 12-13, 2022 (via Zoom)
Closing rituals have their own logic: Melancholy is banned while a kind of festive mood is supposed to set in, one that reminds us of both past feelings of attachment and the future that lies ahead. This is also the case for actual mourning rituals: Providing a sense of identity for a community that is to live on in new forms. To do so, one must make sure of the past, be it a family history or the story of a nation or an “institution.” Our program attempts to incorporate all of these elements: It requires looking back at the Center’s developmental dynamics, in which the unfolding of the “Law as Culture” paradigm played no small role.
This creates the theoretical space for individual narratives about particular thematic foci of our work, which is reflected not least in the wide-ranging analysis of normativities, spanning from good manners to pandemic ethics, digital normativity, or the relationship to nature. Outstanding artists who have joined us as Artists in Residence will talk about their experiences with the cross-pollination of research and art. Thus, we will once again reflexively turn to the question of what constitutes the special charm of and the epistemological opportunities at the Käte Hamburger Centers, unique institutes placed between the pre-modern, aristocratic model à la manière de Saint-Simon and hypermodern think tanks!
The invitation flyer with the complete program can be found here and here, the poster for the conference here.
WDR interview with Dr. Raja Sakrani
A recent WDR interview with Dr. Raja Sakrani about her work at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities "Law as Culture", in particular about research on Islamic legal cultures, is available via the following links:
1. https://www1.wdr.de/radio/cosmo/programm/sendungen/al-saut-al-arabi/arabische- community/arabischecommunity834.html
2. https://fb.watch/cuhuo7x_nj/
3. https://open.spotify.com/episode/3tL8ShjsIOVYd5cHg5N626?si=7c2JISd-Sj6wYrcg5G6cdw&utm_source=native-share-menu
New publication
Soeben ist bei University of Toronto Press ein von Peter Goodrich und Katrin Trüstedt herausgegebener Band erschienen, der sich erneut mit dem Fall des Richters David Paul Schreber beschäftigt, unter dem Titel "Laws of Transgression: The Return of Judge Schreber". Professor Gephart vertritt in dem ersten Beitrag des Bandes die These, dass die deutungsbedürftige Erkrankung Schrebers als eine Fluchtbewegung aus dem eisernen Käfig des systematisch rationalisierten Rechts des späten 19. Jahrhunderts, insofern mit Max Weber, interpretiert werden kann. Hierbei ist auch der letzte Fall Schrebers dokumentiert und transkribiert.
"Bildgestaltung von Werner Gephart"
News March 2022
Book launch: "In the Realm of Corona Normativities II - The Permanence of the Exception"
We would like to draw your attention to the book launch for the second volume of the Corona study titled "In the Realm of Corona Normativities II - The Permanence of the Exception" (ed. by Werner Gephart and Jure Leko) on Tuesday, March 22nd, 2022, 3 p.m. (CEST).
Further information about the book launch can be found here.
The program is structured as follows:
Introduction: Corona and War
Why it makes sense to talk about Corona, even if the war against Ukraine is hogging our attention!
Notes by Gerd Krumeich
The Corona Project at the Käte Hamburger Center “Law as Culture”
Werner Gephart and Jure Leko
1. The Shaking of System Worlds and the Intrusion of the Pandemic into the Lifeworld
Daniel Witte: Theoretical Anomalies
Reactions from Marta Bucholc, Gerd Krumeich et al.
2. Shifts in the Observers’ Perspectives
Mariacarla Gadebusch Bondio, Birgit Ulrike Münch: Observer Paradoxes
Reactions from Beatriz Barreiro Carril, Pierre Brunet et al.
3. Still in the Realm of the Normative
Kornelia Hahn: Coding Contradictions
Reactions from Sam Whimster, Jonas Grutzpalk et al.
4. Cultural Meaning of the Pandemic Crisis
Maurizio Ferraris: Corona and the Human Condition
Reactions from Annemarie Bonnet et al.
5. The Corona Study: Seen from the Outside
Katharina Boele-Woelki: A Look at the Corona Study from a Comparative Law Perspective
News February 2022
Veranstaltungen von Professor Gephart am Institut Michel Villey, April 2022
Prof. Dr. jur. Dr. h.c. Werner Gephart (ancien professeur de SciencesPo und chevalier de l’Ordre Nationale du Mérite) wurde zum "Senior Villey Fellow" für das akademische Jahr 2021/2022 am Institut Michel Villey, Paris II (Panthéon-Assas) ernannt. Im Rahmen dieser Tätigkeit wird er unter anderem ein Doktorandenseminar zur sog. "Rechtssoziologie" Max Webers abhalten, für die es im frankophonen Sprachraum leider nur eine schlechte, wenn nicht irreführende Übersetzung gibt, wenngleich die Weberforschung in Frankreich in den vergangenen Jahrzehnten einen enormen Aufschwung erfahren hat.
Es sind folgende Veranstaltungen geplant:
- Théorie de société et le droit (mit Olivier Beaud)
- Droit et culture: histoires et perspectives (mit Diana Villegas)
- Cultures constitutionelles d’après le paradigme „Recht als Kultur“ (mit Pierre Brunet)
- Instroduction à la lecture de la sociologie de droit chez Max Weber (MWG I/22-3) (mit Olivier Jouanjan)
Insgesamt dient das Veranstaltungspaket dem Transfer von Forschungsergebnissen des Käte Hamburger Kollegs „Recht als Kultur“. Hierbei wird der deutsch-französischen Dimension der Genese einer Soziologie des Rechts, die sich in den Gründervätern Émile Durkheim und Max Weber manifestiert, eine besondere Aufmerksamkeit gewidmet. Das im Kolleg entwickelte „Law-as-Culture Paradigm“ bietet Chancen einer Erweiterung in die Richtung postkolonialer Rechtsdiskurse und Praktiken, sowie einer durchaus feministisch angelegten Rechtsanalyse, in der die „pandemische Geltungskultur“ zum Beispiel „Vulnerabilität“ als ein Motiv juridischen Handelns aufzeigt.
Werner Gephart, 8. März 2022
New publication
Werner Gephart/Jure Leko (eds.): In the Realm of Corona Normativities II - The Permanence of the Exception, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann 2022 (Volume 27 of the series "Law as Culture", edited by Werner Gephart), has just been published.
Further publications of the Käte Hamburger Center "Law as Culture" can be found here.
News December 2021
Pratiksha Baxi receives Infosys Prize 2021
Professor Dr. Pratiksha Baxi, former fellow of the Käte Hamburger Center “Law as Culture”, has been awarded the Infosys Prize 2021 for Social Sciences for her pioneering work on sexual violence and jurisprudence. Her extraordinary ethnographic research and meticulous analysis reveal how gendered violence is reproduced by juridical practice. Her work brilliantly combines legal studies, sociology, and anthropology and has profoundly influenced a growing field of inquiry into the social life of law.
To read the full message, please copy and paste the following link into the address bar of your browser:
https://www.livelaw.in/news-updates/dr-pratiksha-baxi-awarded-infosys-prize-2021-for-social-sciences-186896
Professor Dr. Pratiksha Baxi was fellow at the Käte Hamburger Center “Law as Culture” from April to July 2017, from August to September 2012 and from May to July 2011.
News September 2021
Lecture by Werner Gephart
On Wednesday, September 29, 2021, Professor Gephart will give a key note on "The Normative Framing of Musical Effervescence" at the International Congress of the Society for Music Research as part of the main symposium "Ästhetische Normativität in der Musik" in the ballroom of the University of Bonn. Further information can be found on the website of the congress "Musikwissenschaft nach Beethoven" https://www.gfm2020.uni-bonn.de/ (if you would like to follow this link, please copy and paste it into your browser's address bar).
News July 2021
New Program of the Forum "Law as Culture”
Through its homonymous forum, the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture” offers a space for interdisciplinary and intercultural exchange with international guests and fellows at the Center. The lectures are open to the interested audience and are expected to take place in the Max Weber Lecture Room of the Center or alternatively in the form of live-streams. We look forward to receiving your registration by email (recht.als.kultur@uni-bonn.de).
The current program of October 2021 to March 2022 can be accessed here (PDF).
Detailed information on individual lectures can be accessed under Activities.
Founding Director Professor Gephart has been appointed "Senior Villey Fellow"
Prof. Dr. jur. Dr. h.c. Werner Gephart has been appointed "Senior Villey Fellow" at the Institut Michel Villey, Paris II (Panthéon-Assas) for the academic year 2021/2022. Within the framework of this activity, he will, among other things, hold a doctoral seminar on Max Weber's so-called "Sociology of Law", for which, unfortunately, only a poor, if not misleading, translation exists in the francophone language area.
Communities and the(ir) Law
International Online Conference of the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study “Law as Culture”
July 1-2, 2021 (via Zoom)
The call for community easily acquires a false tongue: either it points to an imaginary realm of harmonious past or to an invocation of commonalities that obscures actual conflicts. At the same time, this dream is alive in many societies: be it in the form of a “belief in community”, in the deconstruction of “imagined community” or in the search for sources of social cohesion. But is “community” only an ideological formula with assumedly magical qualities, in the wake of which the understanding of law also gets caught up, or does the term still point to a central social and sociological problem in modern societies? Against this background, the international conference “Communities and the(ir) Law” is dedicated to the multi-layered connections between “community” and “law” and asks about their possible relevance for burning questions of our contemporary societies.
The debate begins by reviewing the history of the concept of community in social theory, with a special focus on its connections to law, in order to analyze systematic connections between community formation and normativity in a second step. In an ideal-typical comparison, societal communities and their law will then be examined: from the Islamic world to exemplary analyses of China and Nigeria to the pluralism of community forms and normative orders in Indian society. Finally, new forms of community are addressed, which are linked to the transformation and crisis experiences of the present: What role does law play in the construction of gender and identity categories? How can we step out of the anthropocentric worldview and treat things as bearers of rights, perhaps trying to think a “community of things” that also affects our understanding of law? Can we confront climate change at all if we are not prepared to extend the idea of “community” and “commonality” to include nature? And what new forms of community building go hand in hand with the ongoing process of digitalisation and the possible emergence of a digital legal culture, as well as with the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic that we have to endure as part of a global pandemic community?
The international conference “Communities and the(ir) Law” will explore these and other questions on the relationship between community and law. The conference will take place online (via Zoom). To participate in the event, registration is required by 27 June 2021 at: kspranz@uni-bonn.de
Werner Gephart and Daniel Witte
The invitation flyer with the complete program can be found here, the poster for the conference here.
The first partial publication of the recording of the conference can be found here.
News May 2021
The "Law & Society Association" has awarded Joachim Savelsberg the "Harry J. Kalven, Jr. Prize"!
The "Law & Society Association" has awarded Joachim Savelsberg the "Harry J. Kalven, Jr. Prize" (https://cla.umn.edu/sociology/news-events/news/professor-joachim-savelsberg-receives-harry-j-kalven-jr-award ; if you would like to follow this link, please copy and paste it into your browser's address bar): From August 2013 to August 2014, Joachim Savelsberg was a Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities "Law as Culture." During his stay in Bonn he wrote the book "Representing Mass Violence", which Annelise Riles, Chair of the Award Committee, especially appreciated in her laudation. Harry Kalven was the author of the famous book "The American Jury", together with Hans Zeisel, who received this award for the first time. The prize is awarded annually to outstanding scholars for their body of work on "Law and Society." Joachim Savelsberg's new book is "Knowing about Genocide: Armenian Suffering and Epistemic Struggles" (https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520380189/knowing-about-genocide ; if you would like to follow this link, please copy and paste it into your browser's address bar).
Our publisher, Vittorio Klostermann, is awarded the German Publishing Prize!
The publisher Vittorio Klostermann is one of the recipients of the third German Publishing Prize 2021; this was announced by the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media Monika Grütters. 63 publishers are receiving a total of two million euros as prize money. The series "Law as Culture" is also published - meanwhile with 25 volumes - by this highly renowned and once again award-winning publisher. It is edited by Werner Gephart, founding director of the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities "Law as Culture". With contributions by internationally outstanding scholars like Matthias Herdegen, Günther Jakobs, Maurizio Ferraris, Greta Olson, and others, research results of the Center have been communicated to a wider audience by Vittorio Klostermann for over a decade now, in order to shed more light on the cultural dimension of law, also documented in the volumes' design.
International conference "Communities and the(ir) Law"
The international conference "Communities and the(ir) Law", planned for May 2021, will now take place on 1 and 2 July 2021. The conference program will be published soon.
News April 2021
Lecture by Raja Sakrani
We would like to inform you that "PLURIEL - 3rd International Congress" will take place digitally on 13 April 2021, 3pm. The topic of the conference is "Islam & Altérité".
Participants include Dr. jur. Raja Sakrani.
More information on the programm can be found here.
News March 2021
Corona Normativities and the Healing of Societies: Lecture by Werner Gephart
On March 24, 2021, Prof. Dr. jur. Dr. h.c. Werner Gephart, Director (Founding director) of the Käte Hamburger Center „Law as Culture“ will give a lecture entitled „Corona Normativities and the Healing of Societies“ at the CECS (Centre for European and Comparative Legal Studies), University of Copenhagen. The lecture will take place online from 12 to 13:15 p.m. (CET).
Abstract:
The lecture will present a book that was written at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities "Law as Culture" (In the Realm of Corona Normativities. A Momentary Snapschot of a Dynamic Discourse, ed. by Werner Gephart) and has emphasised two aspects in particular:
- the importance of a "pandemic culture of validity", in which all normativity is related to the pandemic state of emergency. Indeed, the cure for the evil of the pandemic crisis is seen in rule-obeying, as a kind of medical remedy.
- reflections and reflexes of the crisis in art and culture complement the cultural studies approach to the analysis of the pandemic.
Further questions remain: How can the differences in the success of fighting the pandemic be explained: in different readiness to obey rules or the respective cultures of sanctions? These and other questions are addressed in the follow-up volume, which confirms that the pandemic is a monstrous laboratory of normativity.
More information on the lecture and the registration can be found here: jura.ku.dk/cecs/calendar/2021/corona-normativities-and-the-healing-of-societies/ (If you would like to follow this link, please copy and paste it into your browser's address bar.)
News February 2021
The German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2022 will be designed by the artist Maria Eichhorn
Maria Eichhorn will design the german pavilion at the Venice Biennale 202. Curator is Yilmaz Dziewior, director of the Museum Ludwig, Cologne. By choosing Maria Eichhorn he has deciced in favor "of an internationally highly recognized artist known as much for her conceptual approach as for her subtle sense of humor. With her visually minimal gestures, spatial interventions, and process- based works, Eichhorn critically examines institutional power structures and political and economic interrelationships".
Maria Eichhorn was Artist in Residence at the Käte Hamburger Center "Law as Culture“ from October 2018 to March 2019 and from October 2019 to March 2020. Her research project Rose Valland Institute examines and documents the expropriation of Europe’s Jewish population and its consequences up to present day. The Institut was established on the occasion of documenta 14.
More information can be found here: www.ifa.de/en/exhibitions/german-pavilion-venice-biennale/ (If you would like to follow this link, please copy and paste it into your browser's address bar.)
News January 2021
New Program of the Forum "Law as Culture”
Through its homonymous forum, the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture” offers a space for interdisciplinary and intercultural exchange with international guests and fellows at the Center. The forum events take place as live-streams on Tuesdays at 6 p.m. We look forward to receiving your registration by email (recht.als.kultur@uni-bonn.de).
The current program of April to July 2021 can be accessed here (PDF).
Detailed information on individual lectures can be accessed under Activities