Projects

Three Criminal Responsibility Paradigms for Artificial Intelligence Agency

Head of project: Elina Nerantzi
Can a harmful artificial intelligence (AI) agent be held directly criminally responsible? This project seeks a new way to address this recurring question. Instead of trying to ascertain whether AI agents could ever be our moral duplicates, responsive as we are to blame and punishment, it asks whether AI agents can be deterred – like the mythical “homo economicus” of the economic theory of crime – or morally educated towards harm-reduction – like our children.

Confronting Discrimination through Police Statistics

Department of Public Law Project

Head of project: Antonia Strecke
The German Black Lives Matter protests, recurring reports of right-wing extremist police chat groups, and racial profiling have led to increased discussion of structural racism within the German police authorities. Although racial discrimination is prohibited under Article 3(3) of the Basic Law, legal recourse against discrimination involves serious evidentiary challenges. After all, state officials are unlikely to simply admit to discriminating against a person on racial grounds.

From Data to Theory in Ethics

Department of Criminal Law Project

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.

“Guilt” and its Significance for (German) Criminal Law

Department of Criminal Law Project

Head of project: Morten Boe
Guilt is the focal point of (German) criminal law: it is a prerequisite of punishment, is guaranteed by the constitutional principle of guilt, and is the epitome of the general systemic decision to adopt a culpability-based criminal law.

Protecting Democracy and the Public Sphere: The Mitigation of ‘Systemic Risks’ in Platform Regulation

Department of Public Law Project

Head of project: Marc André Bovermann
Online platforms are the ‘new governors’ of our digital public sphere. This notion is central to the EU’s sweeping Digital Services Act (DSA) which, after coming into full force and effect on 17 February 2024, aims to foster a safer, more predictable, and trustworthy online environment for all EU Member States.

Mass Surveillance of Financial Data

Department of Public Law Project

Head of project: Lukas Landerer
Data retention characteristically involves storing mass data of persons not suspected of criminal or otherwise dangerous behaviour, and making this data accessible to security authorities. In 2014, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) held that a telecommunications data directive violated European fundamental rights and declared it invalid.

Individual Differences in Selective Prosociality

Project

Head of project: Isabel Thielmann (PI); contributor/researcher: Büşra Elif Yelbuz
Individuals select who they want to be prosocial towards. This is backed up by a longstanding literature showing that humans have the tendency to be prosocial towards certain people or groups rather than others. Yet, surprisingly, up until this point, no research has systematically investigated individual differences in selective prosociality.

Constitutional Requirements for the Treatment of Civil Disobedience

Department of Public Law Project

Head of project: Max Poschmann
While civil disobedience has been widely discussed in political theory, it remains mostly neglected in German legal scholarship. Bridging this gap, this dissertation examines under what conditions, and in what ways, civil disobedience may be constitutionally protected under German law.

Creating Law or Facts? AI Systems Disrupting Criminal Justice

Project

Head of project: Sabine Gless
Are programmers the new lawmakers, as Joseph Weizenbaum insinuated back in the last century? And will they remake the criminal justice universe? Certainly, AI systems will continue to replace human decision-making at various points within the criminal justice system. Today’s prominent examples of such replacements include risk profiling and assistance in sentencing.

Lampposts for Dimly Lit Roads – Bringing Legitimacy Back into the Proportionality Principle

Department of Public Law Project

Head of project: Martha Basazienw Kassa
The proportionality principle is the crown jewel of German legal scholarship, which has long served as a valued framework for human rights and fundamental freedoms adjudication around the world.

Citizenship and Fragmentation in Criminal Law

Department of Criminal Law Project

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”?

From Coercion to Consent: Rape Law Reform in Switzerland

Department of Criminal Law Project

Head of project: Nora Scheidegger
Due to the reconceptualization of rape and other sexual offenses as violations of the victim’s sexual autonomy and in view of the obligations arising from international and regional human rights law, more and more European legal systems are revising their understanding of sexual offenses to reflect the victim’s consent. The wind of change has reached Switzerland, too.

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