Tatjana Hörnle, Jean-Louis van Gelder, and Ralf Poscher – the Institute’s directors – introduce their research departments and explain why the Max Planck Institute is one of the top addresses for international researchers in the fields of criminal law, public law, and criminology.

“How can virtual reality experiments help us to better understand the behavior of burglars?”

“What is the mysterious adhesive that helps the Member States of the European Union stick together?”

“What types of behavior should be criminalized in western democratic states?”

“We probably all agree that plurality is a major characteristic of today´s socie­ties. But what role does plurality play in criminal law? And, in particular, how can we guarantee effective crime control in socie­ties that are so diverse?”

“How do you view your fu­ture? Although I hope you have optimistic expectations, I am con­vinced that one’s view of the future depends very much on past expe­ri­ence. In my research, I consider how future prospects might sud­denly change after being violently victimized.”

“One of the most pressing issues in cur­rent de­bates on criminal justice con­cerns the short­com­ings of imprison­ment. Prison environ­ments can have traumatizing effects on con­fined people. Long prison sentences have no positive impact on relapses on criminal be­hav­ior. Such drawbacks clearly reflect an insti­tu­tional and societal failure to fulfill the individual justice and public safety goals of legal punish­ment.”

“When political violence happens, it is tempting to point a finger at those who committed the violence or those who en­couraged them. But, on inspection, modern political violence doesn’t always meet these expectations. Re­mem­ber the ‘Storm’ on the US Capitol build­ing in 2021, which was plausibly encouraged by a powerful political figure.
This indirect enabling of political vio­lence has become known as ‘stochastic terrorism’. We don’t have many philo­soph­i­cal or legal anal­yses of stochastic terrorism yet, and my re­search here at the Institute aims to address this gap.”