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Markus Dubber

Professor of Law at the University of Toronto (Canada)

Resident at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:

July 2014; June-July 2015; May-June 2016

Research topic at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:

»Legal Science as a Global Discipline«

Project outline:

I’m engaged in a long-term research project on conceptions of the study of law as a global discipline. To start with, I’m interested in developing an approach to legal scholarship that straddles the long-standing divide between common law and civil law systems (New Legal Science). Most recently, I’ve begun to explore the notion of legal scholarship as engaged scholarship that devotes itself to a critical analysis of contemporary law from various perspectives, including both various interdisciplinary approaches and more traditional doctrinal analysis (Rechtsdogmatik). This conception of legal scholarship would seek to overcome the distinction between common law and civil systems by rethinking the project of »legal science« (Rechtswissenschaft), which common law scholars have largely abandoned but civil law scholars (and German jurists in particular) have continued to pursue largely unchanged since the early nineteenth century. A shared conception of legal scholarship—and of law—requires, I believe, a comparative-historical approach. I have laid out such an approach in a recent programmatic paper on »New Historical Jurisprudence,« which draws on and, at the same time, reconceptualizes and reorients the project of historical jurisprudence (historische Rechtswissenschaft) generally associated with Friedrich Carl von Savigny.

During my stay at the Forschungskolleg in May-June 2016, I look forward to discussing and advancing my work on New Historical Jurisprudence and New Legal Science with colleagues at the Normative Orders Excellence Cluster as well as at the University of Frankfurt, the Max-Planck-Institute for European Legal History, and last but not least the Fellows at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften in Bad Homburg. (Markus Dubber)

Funding of the stay:

Excellence Cluster »The formation of normative orders«

Research partner:

While at the Institute, Markus Dubber works together with Klaus Günther, Professor of Law at Goethe University.

Scholarly profile of Markus Dubber

Main areas of research:

Criminal Law, Legal History, Legal Theory, Legal comparison

Selected publications:

An Introduction to the Model Penal Code, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd. ed.. 2015.
(ed. with Tatjana Hörnle), The Oxford Handbook of Criminal Law, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2014.
(ed.), Foundational Texts in Modern Criminal Law, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2014.
(with Tatjana Hörnle), Criminal Law: A Comparative Approach, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2014.
(co-edited with Angela Fernandez), Law Books in Action: Essays on the Anglo-American Legal Treatise, Oxford: Hart Publishing 2012.
(co-edited with Kevin Heller), The Handbook of Comparative Criminal Law, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2010.
(co-edited with Mariana Valverde), Police and the Liberal State, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2008.
(co-edited with Lindsay Farmer), Modern Histories of Crime and Punishment, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2007.
The Sense of Justice: Empathy in Law and Punishment, New York: New York University Press 2006.
The Police Power: Patriarchy and the Foundations of American Government, New York: Columbia University Press 2005.
Victims in the War on Crime: The Use and Abuse of Victims’ Rights, New York: New York University Press 2002.

Further academic activities:
Markus Dubber is editor-in-chief of Critical Analysis of Law: An International & Interdisciplinary Law Review und Oxford Handbooks Online: Law. Since September 2016 Markus Dubber is Director of the Centre of Ethics at the University of Toronto.

Markus Dubber

Scholarly profile of Markus Dubber

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