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Helmut Philipp Aust has been appointed as Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society and Director at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (MPIL) in Heidelberg. He entered office earlier this month on a part-time basis and will serve full-time from 1 September 2026. Born in 1980, he leads the Institute together with Anne Peters and Armin von Bogdandy.
Aust’s work addresses fundamental questions of the international legal order, the role of cities in international law, and the relationship between international law and domestic legal systems. At the MPIL, he is establishing new research foci on the international law of cooperation in antagonistic times, on empirical foreign relations law, and on geographies of international law.
A central area of his research to date is the law of state responsibility. In “Complicity and the Law of State Responsibility” (Cambridge University Press, 2011), he examines the conditions under which states incur responsibility for supporting internationally wrongful acts of other states; for this work he received the Hermann Mosler Prize of the German Society of International Law in 2013.
With “Das Recht der globalen Stadt” (Mohr Siebeck, 2017) and the “Research Handbook on International Law and Cities” (Edward Elgar, 2021; co‑edited with Janne Nijman and awarded the European Society of International Law’s Collaborative Book Prize), he has placed cities as actors in international law at the centre of analysis.
He has also published on the interpretation of international law by domestic courts and on comparative foreign relations law, including the volume “The Interpretation of International Law by Domestic Courts” (Oxford University Press, 2016; with Georg Nolte).
Aust studied law in Göttingen and at Université Paris XII. He received his doctorate from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 2009 and completed his habilitation there in 2016, obtaining the venia legendi in public law, public international law, EU law and comparative law. In 2016 he accepted a chair at Freie Universität Berlin; he declined an offer from Leibniz Universität Hannover in 2022.
His international research and teaching have included periods at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law in Cambridge, Melbourne Law School and Université Paris II Panthéon‑Assas. From 2025 to 2027 he is also Visiting Professor at the Urban Institute of Singapore Management University. He chairs the International Law Association’s committee on urbanisation and international law and serves on advisory bodies of the American Law Institute, the German Red Cross and the German Council on Foreign Relations. In 2022 he received the teaching award of the Faculty of Law at Freie Universität Berlin.
