At a Glance

Civil law plays a significant role in the training of young lawyers and is therefore a major focus in teaching and research at the Department of Law. The main topic of research is examining legal standards in civil law at the national, but also the European and international, levels.

Scholars working in this field explore the entire spectrum of civil law, with particular emphasis on assessment of teachings surrounding legal transactions, general contract law, and the law of default in performance, liability law, private consumer law, family law, and inheritance law. In brief, civil law deals with the following questions: How do you write contracts? How do you fulfill their conditions? What happens, if the conditions are not fulfilled? How do you acquire and lose property? What kinds of rights other than possession can you have in relation to things? What is legally required to get married? How do you get divorced? How do you get your inheritance?

The unit’s work in the field of special private law is equally diverse, encompassing for example, labor and employment law, social law, both commercial law and law of capital markets, and German and European competition and regulatory law.  Roughly speaking, this covers the legal relations of the company to its employees, its sales intermediaries, its investors and lenders, and the limitation of economic power as such.