Current Project

In her PhD project, tentatively titled “German residential tenancy law: A study of the incorporation of extralegal circumstances in legal practice and doctrine”, Lisa Simonis intends to further examine and understand how the conditions of the housing market and the social, economic, and cultural circumstances of the parties involved in a dispute are addressed and methodically processed in legal practice and doctrine. The study deals with residential tenancy law, which is of great importance to individuals in a country of tenants like Germany, particularly because the subject of the rental agreement is, after all, nothing less than the person’s home. Tenancy law is, moreover, a constantly evolving “practitioner field”, where legal change comes about not only through legislative texts, but even more so through the interpretive work of judges and lawyers.

With this in mind, Simonis’s PhD project focuses on the incorporation of the described extralegal circumstances within this environment of legal change, starting from the hypothesis that legal practice, especially in large and pressured housing markets, does not simply apply rules in a vacuum. Instead, it reacts and responds to those background conditions – sometimes through argumentation strategies related to social realities and, building on that, through the adaptation of new differentiations, definitions, and interpretations of legal terms, and sometimes through changes at the level of procedural law. In a more general sense, then, Simonis is interested in how the courts, the involved parties, and their legal representatives employ tenancy law provisions to address the aforementioned circumstances within the logic of the law, and how the interests and social situations of the contracting parties are thereby translated into legal categories and constructs. In summary, the study’s aim is to document, analyse, and explain these developments and ultimately contribute to an understanding of the interplay between law and the described extralegal circumstances.

The chosen method for this is, in the first step, courtroom ethnography, meaning careful observation and detailed recording of legal cases in various local courts in Berlin, as well as semi-structured interviews with legal practitioners such as judges, lawyers, and representatives of tenant associations. In addition, court files will be examined in order to classify and further understand how the described background conditions are discussed in the written correspondence between the parties, which lays out the relevant facts and legal arguments in preparation for the oral proceedings. In a second step, the findings obtained during the fieldwork will be linked to developments in current case law and to the legal literature.