Research and research profile

Research

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Photo: geralt

The rich research spectrum of our faculty is reflected, among other things, in the large number of specialized institutes with special research emphases (e.g. medical law, Eastern European law and comparative law), which enable modern and intensive research in almost all areas of law. Almost every chair has its own institute with one or more research focuses, some of which are unique in Germany. The Faculty of Law recognizes at an early stage tendencies that are of great social relevance and contain the legal challenges of the future. The main characteristic of the entire research is that it not only examines questions of national law, but always also comparative law and international references. It ensures both basic and practice-oriented research and always seeks exchange with other disciplines and social actors.
The Faculty of Law thus not only promotes and accompanies the application and further development of law in legal practice, but also to the highest degree in politics and society.

Research profile

The research of the Faculty of Law can be divided into five large research fields, which are related to each other by numerous cross-sectional questions:

International, supranational, and transnational law

Very early on, the Faculty devoted itself to the legal issues associated with the increasing international interdependence between individuals, societies, institutions and states. With the large number of international and European law scholars, the Faculty has a unique concentration of specialists in the field of international and European law, whose institutes represent the field of international and European law as far as possible. The Institute for Air and Space Law, the Institute for International Peace and Security Law and the International Investment Law Centre Cologne (IILCC) are pioneers in this field. In addition to numerous other institutes dealing with civil law issues of internationalisation (e.g. questions of the development of European private law or transnational commercial law), the Institute for International and Foreign Private Law has been one of the most important of its kind in Germany for over 65 years.

Economy, Labour, Health, Social Affairs, and Taxes

Particular attention has always been paid in Cologne to those areas which are of central importance for companies and for economic and social coexistence in a social market economy. The Institute for Labour and Economic Law, as one of the largest in Germany, still stands today for the valuable but seldom found tradition of networking the economically important subjects of labour, economic and social law. In addition, a large number of leading scientific institutes, such as the Institute for German and European Labour and Social Law (IDEAS), deal with these areas and their national and international problems of a financial, corporate, antitrust and supervisory nature. This research is complemented by the equally important economic work in medical, health and insurance law as well as in the law of the liberal professions. The procedural flank is covered in particular by the Institute for Procedural Law and Insolvency Law. Although this research focus is based on private law, due to its immense influence it also covers issues from commercial administrative law, energy law, environmental law, tax and accounting law as well as commercial criminal law.

Media, Communications, and Intellectual Property

The rapid developments of "digitisation" are causing considerable changes in the social and economic framework conditions of our society and raise a multitude of legal questions that have hardly been clarified so far. They range from the fundamentals and limits of industrial property rights and the protection of personality in our information society to the question of the need for further development of regulation and supervision. The Institute for Intellectual Property and Copyright Law and the Institute for Media Law and Communications Law are particularly successful in dealing with the legal aspects of this still young field of research.

The Citizen and the State

Even today, the Faculty of Law still regards researching the relationship between citizens and the state as a task entrusted to it with the founding of the Citizens' University of Cologne. The central core areas of constitutional and administrative law have always been at the centre of research, alongside public commercial law and state church law. The Institute for German and European Science Law is probably unique in this context. Criminal law and criminal procedural law, to which, among others, the Institute for Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure Law and the Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law devote themselves, and which has also developed to a large extent into an international discipline, deal with an essential, practically extremely important aspect of the relationship between state and individual.

Fundamentals and Principles of Law

Legal research is hardly possible without an understanding of the fundamentals and principles of law. For this reason, three institutes alone (Institute for the History of Modern Private Law, History of German and Rhenish Law, Institute for Canon Law and History of Rhenish Canon Law and Institute for Roman Law) investigate the historical foundations of law from antiquity to modern times. The basic research in Cologne also includes the examination of the legal philosophical, political and theoretical foundations of our legal system (e.g. in the Seminar for Philosophy of State and Legal Policy) as well as criminology, which as an interdisciplinary, empirical science of criminal law examines the effectiveness of criminal interventions and the behaviour of perpetrators, victims, the general public and instances of social control.