I’m engaged in a long-term research project on conceptions of the study of law as a global discipline. To start with, I’m interested in developing an approach to legal scholarship that straddles the long-standing divide between common law and civil law systems (New Legal Science). Most recently, I’ve begun to explore the notion of legal scholarship as engaged scholarship that devotes itself to a critical analysis of contemporary law from various perspectives, including both various interdisciplinary approaches and more traditional doctrinal analysis (Rechtsdogmatik). This conception of legal scholarship would seek to overcome the distinction between common law and civil systems by rethinking the project of »legal science« (Rechtswissenschaft), which common law scholars have largely abandoned but civil law scholars (and German jurists in particular) have continued to pursue largely unchanged since the early nineteenth century. A shared conception of legal scholarship—and of law—requires, I believe, a comparative-historical approach. I have laid out such an approach in a recent programmatic paper on »New Historical Jurisprudence,« which draws on and, at the same time, reconceptualizes and reorients the project of historical jurisprudence (historische Rechtswissenschaft) generally associated with Friedrich Carl von Savigny.

During my stay at the Forschungskolleg in May-June 2016, I look forward to discussing and advancing my work on New Historical Jurisprudence and New Legal Science with colleagues at the Normative Orders Excellence Cluster as well as at the University of Frankfurt, the Max-Planck-Institute for European Legal History, and last but not least the Fellows at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften in Bad Homburg. (Markus Dubber)