Research interests

My research interests are chiefly located in the fields of Legal History (legal evolution and the emergence of concepts for right and law) on the one hand, and in Legal Theory on the other hand (the recent and current discussions on 'legal dogma'; Western legal culture’s claims to universality).

In particular, I am focusing on:

• Common and civil law cultures - the entire set of problems related to their differential evolution, long-term coexistence, mutually exclusive rationalities, dealt with both as emerging and as programmatic realities. Chances and risks involved in the attempt of understanding the current evolution; problems of the convergence thesis; comparisons between the approach to comparing (1) between comparative law and other comparative disciplines, (2) between everyday empirical and makeshift meddling with legal orders of basically opposed predispositions and the more successful so-called “theoretical” approaches: operation-related, constructivist, anhistoric.
• Autopoiesis theory and the re-assessment of the legal system within the analysis of social systems in terms of autopoietically functioning, self-regulating agencies. Here the topics include: the philosophical and political genealogy of the autopoietic account of the law; the question of which social hopes can still be linked to politics if Luhmann is right with his re-assessment of the position of politics within society; comparing Luhmann with his contemporaries; the case of Habermas; a new Mesopotamia, or, the densely populated zones in between Luhmann and Habermas; the singular path of Gunther Teubner.
• The understanding of the conceptual array related to the inherited “squint” of the Western normative tradition: the legal norm as law/loi/ lex, etc., and as right/droit/ius etc. The evolutionary steps of the Western Legal Tradition. The culture of representation and interpretation underlying the legal system - specifically with respect to the history of the Western approach of the text and, more specifically, at its medieval and early modern religious and politico-legal underpinnings; their analysis in terms of an anthropological inquiry into current and traditional constructions of 'Western culture'.