Transformations in Private Law:
Culture, Climate, and Technology
The Max Planck Research Group examines how social reality is translated into law and how this, in turn, affects legal norms and practices. Embracing the interdisciplinary vision of the Law & Anthropology Department, of which it forms part, the group focuses on judicial proceedings within private law to study these transformations across three interconnected dimensions: transformations of social reality through legal processes, the resulting transformations of law itself, and overarching societal shifts.
Our research is structured around two intersecting axes that capture the complexity of these dynamics. The first axis is formed by the key areas of social reality to which the group directs its attention: cultural diversity, climate change, and digital transformation. The second axis relates to the different origins of knowledge about social reality, which can be based on personal experience and socially shared convictions (“everyday knowledge”) or on systematic research and evidence (“scientific knowledge”).
At the intersection of these axes lies a fundamental challenge: the coexistence of plural, competing descriptions of reality. Because judicial decision-making processes necessarily involve epistemic selection, courts must ultimately choose which descriptions of reality are accepted by the law and recognized as authoritative. The group investigates where and how these selections occur, what knowledge is utilized, and what is excluded, specifically exploring how these background assumptions shape legal reasoning and judicial decisions within the law of obligations.
Cultural Pluralism, Climate Change and Digital Transformation in Private Law — Mareike Schmidt
Methodological Approach and Disciplinary Positioning
Positioned at the intersection of legal anthropology and private law doctrine, the group adopts a distinct internal–external perspective. We combine empirical methods and ethnographic sensitivity to identify and question taken-for-granted assumptions in legal practice, while taking legal doctrine and methodology seriously as the internal communications of the legal community. Our work goes beyond external observation to actively contribute to internal legal discourses, specifically aiming to capture the blind spots in the transformation of social reality into law and identify possibilities for their elaboration in legal doctrine, methodology, and practice.
Monograph Projects
Mareike Schmidt’s monograph project ‘Cultural Diversity in Private Law’ provides the overarching framework for the group’s research programme. Taking the German law of obligations as her primary field of analysis, Schmidt investigates how culturally embedded conceptions of normality shape the translation of social reality into legal reasoning and judicial decisions in the law of obligations. The project is based on an extensive case law analysis and integrates doctrinal, methodological, and socio-theoretical perspectives.
All three PhD students’ projects pursue empirical research within this framework, each with a specific lens which allows them to make the transformations of social reality in law visible.
Friederike Gehrke’s project ‘Judicial impartiality in plural societies – 'the reality‘ in German civil procedure’ focuses on the construction of legal facts in civil proceedings in German courts, using German culturally diverse society to examine the taken-for-granted assumptions judges rely on when translating social reality into legal facts.
Shifting the focus to a specific part of social reality, Igal Lavi, in his project ‘Religious Litigation in Private Law: An Ethnographic Study of Sincerity and Religious Law in Israeli Courts’, examines religious claims in Israeli civil courts, asking how descriptions of religious norms and individual sincerity are transformed in legal processes.
Finally, Lisa Simonis’ project ‘German residential tenancy law: A study of the incorporation of extralegal circumstances in legal practice and doctrine’ adds a temporal dimension to these transformations by focusing on the practice of German residential tenancy law, examining how changes in these extralegal circumstances can lead to diachronous changes in legal practice and doctrine.
Third Party Funded Project
The project ‘Change in and through Law: Digital Transformation and Climate Change’, which Mareike Schmidt carries out with two colleagues from different institutions, looks at the incorporation of scientific knowledge regarding technological and societal into legal regulation, methodology, and doctrine as well as legal education.
Student Assistants
The student assistants, who all have a legal background and are currently pursuing their university degrees, play an integral role in the Research Group’s projects. They provide essential support through comparative legal research and by monitoring recent academic publications within the group's research fields. Additionally, they assist in refining and proofreading academic manuscripts to ensure the highest quality of our collective output.