Cooperations

A network of context-sensitive legal research

To promote context-sensitive legal research in Germany, Recht im Kontext cooperates with many research institutions in Germany, e.g. the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, the Cluster of Excellence Normative Orders, the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, the Max Planck Institutes for European Legal History in Frankfurt am Main, for Social Anthropology and for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg. As a former program at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, it continues to cooperate with the Institute, e.g. in accompanying the Zukunftsfakultät.

Recht im Kontext was a partner of the Wissenschaftsrat through its postdoctoral programme Rechtskulturen at the Forum Transregionale Studien when it came to translating its recommendations on the perspectives of law into English. Recht im Kontext cooperated with the Konferenz der Justizministerinnen und -minister der Länder (JMK) in order to work towards a stronger interdisciplinary and international character of legal education in Germany. Other partners in projects were research funding institutions such as the Vodafone-Stiftung, the Dräger-Stiftung and the  VolkswagenStiftung. Together with the British Socio-Legal Studies Association, Recht im Kontext is organising a workshop in September 2019 that will reflect on the state of interdisciplinary approaches to law.

Verfassungsblog

As a (legal) academic infrastructure, the Research Network Recht im Kontext also supports innovative research and publication formats like the Verfassungsblog – the constitutionalist forum of debate with a focus on the emerging European constitutional space and its ramifications on national and
transnational levels.

The evaluation report of Recht im Kontext describes the Verfassungsblog as “one of the most visible elements of the Project, with eminent spillover effects” (such as the emergence of other law blogs). The Verfassungsblog therefore became an attractive address for distinguished scholars to publish blog posts, prompting the transformation of the Verfassungsblog into one of the “most interesting and frequently read forums for constitutional law and policy”. The evaluation committee considers the Verfassungsblog “as a must read for those who are interested or engaged professionally in issues of public law and constitutional politics in Europe”. According to the report, the Verfassungsblog is not only widely used but widely respected, with an importance that reaches far beyond German borders. The  connection between blog and academic events “has produced a wholly new way of participating in a conference, allowing for the diffusion of state of the art research to young scholars in ways that would be impossible via book publications”.
 

See verfassungsblog.de