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Helmut Philipp Aust is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law and Professor of Public Law and the Internationalisation of the Legal Order at Freie Universität Berlin.
His research addresses fundamental questions of the international legal order, state responsibility, the role of cities in international law, and the relationship between international law and domestic legal systems. At the Institute, he focuses on the international law of co-operation in antagonistic times, on empirical foreign relations law, and on the geographies of international law.
Aust studied law in Göttingen and at Université Paris XII, received his doctorate from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 2009, and completed his habilitation there in 2016 in public law, public international law, European Union law, and comparative law. He has taught at Freie Universität Berlin since 2016. His research and teaching have also taken him to the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law in Cambridge, Melbourne Law School, and Université Paris II Panthéon-Assas.
His publications include Complicity and the Law of State Responsibility (2011), Das Recht der globalen Stadt (2017), and the Research Handbook on International Law and Cities (2021), co-edited with Janne Nijman, which received the European Society of International Law’s Collaborative Book Prize in 2022. From 2025 to 2027, he is also Visiting Professor at the Urban Institute of Singapore Management University. Within the International Law Association, he co-chairs, with Janne Nijman, the committee “Urbanisation and International Law – Potential and Pitfalls”.
