Department of Criminal Law

Head of project: Michael Mertes
German sentencing law operates within the tension between normative control and judicial discretion. Despite its central importance to the criminal justice system, it lacks binding and clearly structured standards capable of ensuring transparent, consistent, and predictable sentencing. more

Head of project: Benjamin Vogel
Globalization and digitalization have profoundly changed the relationship between nation states and the private sector in recent decades. Increasingly, private com-panies are creating and controlling the spaces in which economic and social interactions take place – for example, on the Internet or in financial markets. more

Head of project: Suheib Qaderi
German criminal law provides a set of norms that (ostensibly) presuppose a moral judgment. For example, public prosecutors and courts have to judge questions of “reprehensibility,” “common decency,” and “base motives.” How are such assessments to be made in an ideologically neutral state? more

Head of project: Valerij Zisman
Normative debates often rely on theories about what is right and wrong. In the case of punishment theory, for ex­am­ple, retributivists often rely on deontological theories, while proponents of deterrence theory draw from utilitari­an­ism. more

Heads of project: Valerij Zisman, Ivó Co­ca-Vi­la
What role does the relationship between the state and its citizens play for criminal law theory? A number of in­flu­en­tial scholars assume that criminal law must be founded on a bond of citizenship between the offender and the state that reinforces the legitimacy of criminal punishment. If this is the case, how does this assumption affect the state’s standing when it punishes non-citizens or “semi-citizens”? more