Change in and through the Law - Digital Transformation and Climate Change

The project analyses how descriptions of reality from other disciplines are methodically processed in law. Two fundamental and complex changes in reality, the digital transformation and climate change, serve as contrasting analytical foils for the study. A comparative analysis of the legal handling of these processes of change should, on the one hand, reveal overarching methodological approaches to the inclusion of complex and divergent bodies of knowledge from other disciplines that go beyond a field-specific special dogmatics. On the other hand, the comparison should sensitise for specifics, especially for the medial transformation of the application of law itself through legal tech as well as for lawmaking processes in view of uncertain (causal) connections in greenhouse gas reduction measures. Moreover, the digital transformation primarily brings about a change in law through changes in the subject matter and the media framework, while climate change calls for social change through law. On the basis of a cross-legal-discipline analysis of the methodological handling of these challenges, impulses for dogmatic methodology and its rational handling of structural social change will be developed. Building on a description of the change in reality, three methodological dimensions are analysed for this purpose: legal dogmatics, the methodology of the application of law and legislative theory. These will be supplemented by teaching concepts that address the resulting need for change in law studies.

Project participants

• Prof. Dr. Roland Broemel
• Prof. Dr. Mareike Schmidt, LL.M. (Tsinghua, China)
• Prof. Dr. Angela Schwerdtfeger

Project Start

• 01.09.2023
• Duration: Two years

Funding Organization

• VolkswagenStiftung (Project page)