Curriculum Vitae
Dr. Sarah Katharina Stein, LL.M. (Columbia) studied law in Hannover, Germany and Dublin, Ireland. In addition to being a fully qualified lawyer, she holds a Magister Legum Euopae from University College Dublin (summa cum laude), a Master of Laws from Columbia Law School (James Kent Scholar, highest honors, and Parker School Recognition of Achievement in International and Comparative Law), and a Ph.D. from Ludwigs-Maximilians-University of Munich (summa cum laude), for which she was awarded the Faculty Prize in 2023. Her dissertation ("The Privatised War. Private Military Contractors between State Tasks and State Abandonment", Tübingen 2024) analyzes how states use private military contractors to gain advantages, but ultimately compromise their monopoly on the use of force, weaken democratic principles, and undermine the rule of law. Prior to her current postdoctoral work at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law in Freiburg, Germany, she worked as a research assistant at the University of Freiburg and Columbia Law School and as a legal advisor to the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions and was a visiting researcher at Yale Law School, at the Schell Center for International Human Rights. Her studies were supported by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, and the German Ministry of the Interior, among others. Furthermore, Katharina is Vice-Secretary General of ICON-S Germany. Her research focusses on public international law, with a special interest in international humanitarian law, comparative constitutional law and jurisprudence.
