Project

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

Published in 1963, Theodor W. Adorno’s “Sexual Taboos and Law Today” constituted a timely intervention in the public debate on changing sexual mores in the 1960s. Critiquing repressive bourgeois morality and progressive sexual values alike, the essay suggests that the utopian potential of intimacy is inseparable from the tension sex­u­al­ity creates for self and society. The text’s most famous line – “It is a nice bit of sexual utopia not to be yourself” – already locates the promise of sexuality in the momentary dissolution of identity. It meets with Adorno’s claim that without its anarchical and transgressive aspects sexuality becomes neutralised and inert. Yet, these aspects evoke society’s contempt: “What is specifically sexual is eo ipso forbidden,” Adorno writes.
Sixty years on, in the wake of #MeToo and heightened public concern for gender equality, trans rights, and identity politics, “Sexual Taboos and Law Today” provokes renewed scrutiny. A special issue of the Journal of Adorno Studies will open its pages to international experts in the fields of critical theory, legal theory, and psychoanalysis to discuss the force and limitations of “Sexual Taboos and Law Today” in a contemporary context. 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

Heads of project: Ralf Poscher, Elisa Orrù
FreiburgRESIST is a federally-funded, collaborative research pro­ject involving the City of Freiburg authorities and the University of Freiburg’s transdisciplinary Cen­tre for Security and Society. It integrates the fields of information technology, ju­rid­ical, sociological, ethical, and political security research. 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