Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory Campuses

The Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory's sole campus in Frankfurt am Main serves as a premier research hub dedicated to theoretically informed historical inquiry into law and normativity. With three specialized departments and research groups, it fosters comparative, global, and multidisciplinary perspectives on legal history and theory, supported by an extensive specialist library of approximately 490,000 media units.

• European and Comparative Legal History: Focuses on the history of private, public, international, and criminal law across European and global contexts, emphasizing source-based analysis and overcoming Eurocentric assumptions.
• Historical Regimes of Normativity: Explores historical forms of law within broader normative orders, including non-European regions and comparative global perspectives on legal transformation and practice.
• Multidisciplinary Theory of Law: Develops contemporary legal theory through multidisciplinary approaches, addressing questions of law's constitution, legitimation, and societal embedding.
• Max Planck Research Groups: Conduct targeted projects on emerging themes in legal history and theory, often in international collaboration.
• Additional Resources: Includes extensive publications, journals like Rechtsgeschichte - Legal History, and visitor programs supporting doctoral and postdoctoral research in legal scholarship, history, and humanities.