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Photo: Fritz Bauer Institut

Director, Max Planck Institute for European Legal History; Professor for Public Law and Legal History, Universität Frankfurt

Fritz Stern Lecturer - Class of Spring 2008


Michael Stolleis is professor emeritus of public law and the history of modern law at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. Since 1992, he is also the director of the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History. The history of private law was at the center of the institute’s activities until the end of the 1980s, and it was Stolleis who shifted the organization’s focus to the origins and development of public law. He laid the foundation for this new concentration in his three published volumes on the history of public law in Germany, entitled Geschichte des Öffentlichen Rechts in Deutschland. In this context he also wrote Law under the Swastika (Chicago, 1997). Stolleis’ legal work and numerous publications have earned him several awards, including the Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in 1991, and the prize from the International Balzan Prize Foundation in 2000.

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