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Institutional Cooperation

German Federal Foreign Office

The Institute assists the German Federal Foreign Office at conferences and during international negotiations with its expertise in public international law and comparative law. Anne Peters is a member of the Council of International Law of the German Federal Foreign Office. The head of the international law division of the German Federal Foreign Office is, in turn, a permanent member of the Board of Trustees of the Institute.


Heidelberg Discussion Group on the Constitutional Court Association

Armin von Bogdandy organizes the Heidelberg Discussion Group on the Constitutional Court Association, which brings together European judges and selected scholars each year for an intensive and confidential discussion of critical issues. Members include the President of the Court of Justice of the European Union, the President of the Federal Constitutional Court, the President of the Austrian Constitutional Court, the President of the Slovenian Constitutional Court, the President of the Belgian Constitutional Court, and the Vice President of the Italian Constitutional Court.


Cooperation with German Research Institutions

Armin von Bogdandy is an honorary professor at the University of Frankfurt/Main. Armin von Bogdandy's most important domestic cooperation partners are the Department of Law as well as the Cluster of Excellence ConTrust at the University of Frankfurt/Main, the Heidelberg University of Education, and the Faculty of Law at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

Anne Peters is an honorary professor at the Ruprecht Karls University in Heidelberg and at the Free University of Berlin. Regular workshops are organised with the German Federal Foreign Office through the Institute's Berlin office, mostly once a year.


Cooperation with Foreign Research Institutions

During the reporting period, Armin von Bogdandy held visiting professorships at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and at the University of Tel Aviv.

There were joint authorships with scholars from the Catholic University of Caracas, Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, the University of Warsaw, and the Vienna University of Economics and Business.

There are joint editorships with researchers from the following universities: Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich, Vienna University of Economics and Business, University of Warsaw, University of Bologna, University of Lisbon, Heidelberg University of Education, New York University Abu Dhabi, University of Salamanca, Europa-Institut of Saarland University, and Universidad del País Vasco.

For several years, the Institute has been building a scientific network in Latin America under the direction of Armin von Bogdandy and Mariela Morales Antoniazzi. The network consists of approximately 500 scholars from constitutional and international law and researchers from neighboring disciplines such as history, political science and economics. The goal of the network is to provide scholarly support for transformative constitutionalism in Latin America. The cooperation includes the exchange of scholars, the joint organization of conferences, and joint publications. The Coloquio Iberoamericano and the Ius Constitutionale Commune en América Latina project represent the Institute's most important contributions to this network. Formalized cooperative relationships exist with the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Commission.

 

Anne Peters is involved in research and teaching at the University of Basel. She has been holding an annual doctoral seminar there since 2019. She is furthermore Vice-President of the Board of Trustees of the Basel Institute on Governance (BIG), where she is regularly involved in governance projects, for example with research on "Corruption and Human Rights".

Close contacts exist with the universities of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas and Sciences Po, and doctoral students are supervised in cotutelle. Since 2015, the German-French academic partnership named HeiParisMax unites the MPIL, the Faculty of Law at Heidelberg University, and on the French side, the École de Droit de la Sorbonne (Paris 1) and Sciences Po. The aim of the partnership is to create a research network, especially in a German-French framework. In addition, research stays on the other side of the Rhine shall be facilitated for young researchers (doctoral and post-doctoral students) without high bureaucratic hurdles. Both directors have held visiting professorships at these institutions on several occasions. Prof. Evelyne Lagrange (Paris I) was a member of the Advisory Board and has been an External Scientific Member of the Institute since 2015. Prof. Emmanuelle Tourme Jouannet (Sciences Po) has been co-editor of the Journal of the History of International Law, edited by the Institute, since 2014. Anne Peters regularly participates in the meetings of the German and French associations for international law (DGIR and SFDI) and, since 2016, in the Franco-German doctoral seminar for comparative law.

Since 2014, the Institute has been an institutional member of the European Society of International Law (ESIL), which is affiliated with the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. The Institute is present at the annual conferences of ESIL (last in Utrecht in September 2022) with its own book table.

In the research area of Global Animal Law, there has been close cooperation with the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, where Anne Peters gave annual lectures on this topic from 2014 - 2022. She is co-founder of the research cooperation Educational Group for Animal Law Studies (EGALS). There is a close collaboration with the Animal Law & Policy Program at Harvard Law School. Anne Peters, Saskia Stucki (MPIL) and Professor Kristen Stilt (Harvard) are co-editing an Oxford Handbook on Global Animal Law; author workshops have been held online and at Harvard.

Anne Peters is a member of the Committee on the Use of Force of the International Law Association (ILA). There are close contacts with the Law School of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Daniel Halberstam was a member and until 2019 chair of the Academic Advisory Board; he has given a Master Class at the Institute in 2023. Anne Peters was appointed L. Bates Lea Global Law Professor at the Law School, effective 2017. She lectures on Global Animal Law at Michigan Law School on a biennial basis.

A regional focus is on Japan and China. Anne Peters is involved in a research project at Waseda University (Tokyo) on Global Constitutionalism and supervised a doctoral student at Waseda Law Faculty whose dissertation was published in the Institute's „Schwarze Reihe“. At Peking University (Beida), she held a visiting professorship in 2014 and was a Visiting Professor and Global Fellow in 2016. Anne Peters has been a member of the Beida Global Faculty since 2020. Beida regularly sends doctoral students and postdocs to the Institute.

Anne Peters is conducting four-year research project on Transitional Justice in cooperation with the Minerva Centre for Human Rights (Tel Aviv and Jerusalem), in which a doctoral student is involved on the Heidelberg side. Due to the pandemic, the planned research stays of younger academics at the respective partner institution could not take place, but they are planned for 2023. In 2022, a summer school took place in Heidelberg under the broad overarching theme of „The Individual in International Law“, with the participation of colleagues from the Universities of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Bar Ilan. The course focused on methodological approaches (historical, behaviouralist, systems theory, etc.).

The Institute for International and Comparative Law in Africa (University of Pretoria) assists in the editorial supervision of the Constitutions of the Countries of the World.

The Institute has been active for more than ten years in the Global Knowledge Transfer. Following the spin-off of the Max Planck Foundation for International Peace and the Rule of Law, this work is continuing on a smaller scale, partially in cooperation with the Foundation. The particular projects involved especially target countries that are striving to establish legal and democratic structures after conflicts.