Team and Contact

Justine is a Research Assistant in International Law and a Law Clerk (‘Rechtsreferendarin’) at the Higher Court Berlin. She studied law in Potsdam and Paris Nanterre, and holds a Master of Laws in International Law from University College London (UCL). Her fields of research include International Human Rights Law, Comparative Constitutional Law, and Fundamental Rights.

Thomas works as a Legal Associate for Institutional and Administrative Law at the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in Beijing, China. Previously, he worked as a Ph.D. researcher at the Chair for Public Law and Comparative Law at Humboldt University Berlin and was a visiting scholar at Columbia Law School, New York. His research lies at the intersection of public international law, the law of international organizations, and law & development.

Fabian is a PhD candidate and W.M. Tapp Scholar at the University of Cambridge. Previously, he worked as a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg and as a research assistant at the Lauterpacht Centre, University of Cambridge, and the PluriCourts Centre, University of Oslo. Fabian is a general international lawyer with particular research interests in the areas of international dispute settlement and international economic law.  

Philipp is a research associate at Bucerius Law School and a PhD candidate at the Walther Schücking Institute for International Law. He holds a scholarship from Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes and is currently a visiting scholar at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law in Cambridge. His fields of research include international adjudication, transitional justice, legal aesthetics and critical legal studies.

Sué is a legal trainee (Rechtsreferendarin) in Frankfurt am Main. Her research focuses on international legal theory, especially regarding sources and interpretation.

Julian A. Hettihewa studied law in Berlin and London and is a Ph.D. candidate and research assistant at the Institute for Public International Law in Bonn. Currently, Julian holds a lectureship at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and is a Visiting Student at the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing. His research focuses on the relationship between international law and youth. He is interested in international legal theory and critical approaches to international law.

Jens works in the Leipzig office of Luther. His areas of practice include private construction law, real estate transactions and European state aid law. However, international law is part of his DNA. His previous professional stages include work for a public international law chair at the University of Jena and the Walther Schücking Institute at Kiel University. He has also been involved with the Jessup Moot Court competition since 2011 as a participant, coach, national administrator and judge. He is a member of the Jessup Rules Committee.

Spyridoula (Sissy) Katsoni is a PhD student at Ruhr-University Bochum and a Research Associate at the Institute for International Law of Peace and Armed Conflict (IFHV). She is a SYLFF Young Leaders Fellow and a member of the SYLFF Mikrokolleg on Forced Migration. Her research interests include international refugee law, human rights law, treaty interpretation and state responsibility.

Ass. iur. Lukas Kleinert, Master Droit, LL.M. is writing his Ph.D. at the University of Hamburg on an European and public international law related topic. He has been a member of the editorial team of the Völkerrechtsblog since 2018.

Valentina studied law in Berlin, Germany, and Birmingham, United Kingdom. Currently, she works as a clerk for the German Federal Ministry of Justice. She is interested in public international law and the law of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Meike Krakau is a doctoral candidate and a research assistant at the Chair of Public International Law and Public Law at the Ludwig-Maximilians University (Munich). Her research interests include international environmental law with a special focus on climate change litigation, human rights law and international adjudication.

Raffaela is a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law and manager of the project “Scientific Blogs as Infrastructure for Digital Publishing and Academic Communication: Expanding the Model Project ‘Völkerrechtsblog’“. Her fields of research include international courts and tribunals with a special focus on the ECtHR, human rights law, and the relationship between international and domestic law. Her current research project focuses on Open Access, the right to science and epistemic justice.

Isabel is currently a trainee with the Regional Court in Aachen and a Post Doctoral Research Assistant with Prof. Dr. Nora Markard at WWU Münster. She focuses on global governance, feminist and queer legal theory, empirical methods, and access to justice.

Darshana Mitra teaches citizenship and immigration law at the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata.  Her work is on human rights, citizenship law, refugee law and migration, and currently she is also working with Parichay, a legal aid clinic she co-founded, which seeks to provide legal assistance to persons excluded from the National Register of Citizens in Assam, India.

Miriam Nomanni is a Research Assistant at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena and is currently working on her doctoral thesis “Der Strafvollzug an Verurteilten nach dem Völkerstrafgesetzbuch”. Her fields of research include international criminal law and its tribunals as well as universal jurisdiction and the enforcement of sentences relating to international crimes.

Benjamin is doctoral candidate and Research Fellow at the Institute for International Peace and Security Law at the University Cologne. His research interests include international peace and security law with a special focus on the ius contra bellum, complicity in international law and general international law.

Raphael is an Advisor to the Executive Director at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF), Adjunct Lecturer at Mannheim Law School and an external PhD candidate at Goethe University Frankfurt.

His current fields of research include international (criminal) courts and tribunals with a special focus on the actorness in international relations, the interplay of pandemics and international law as well as (theoretical) questions pertaining to areas of limited statehood (including the Arctic, Antarctica, or the High Seas).

Christian is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory and a member of the research project “Methods of the history of global law”. His fields of research include the history and normative foundations of the modern law of the sea, processes of norm-genesis in international law and comparative international law.

Muratcan Sabuncu is a PhD student in international law at the universities of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and Basel. He is currently working as a teaching assistant at Moscow State University.

Anna-Julia is a PhD candidate at Humboldt University (Berlin). She
graduated from King’s College, London, Humboldt University, Berlin, and La Sapienza, Rome, and is currently working at the Institute for Media and Information Law at Albert-Ludwigs University Freiburg (GER).

In her research she focusses on international climate change law,
sustainability governance and comparative international law; her PhD project examines the role of domestic courts in international climate
change law.

Dana Schmalz is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, she holds a scholarship from the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation. Her work centers on refugee and migration law, human rights, and legal philosophy. In her current research project, she is exploring how population growth has been an object of international legal activities.

Sophie Schuberth is a visiting research fellow at the Minerva Center for Human Rights at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a PhD-candidate in the Berlin Potsdam Research Group ‘The International Rule of Law- Rise or Decline?’ at Freie Universität Berlin. Her fields of interest include the law of state responsibility and international humanitarian law. Her current research focuses on third state responsibility in international law.

Sebastian M. Spitra is a Post-Doc Fellow at the Department for Legal and Constitutional History of the University of Vienna and a member of the Junge Akademie at the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz. His fields of research include the history of international law, postcolonial legal studies, cultural heritage law and global legal history.

Marlene is a student at the Oxford Internet Institute with an LL.M. from the University of Edinburgh, and a background in European law and policy. Her research interests span private power in the digital economy, digital rights, the privatisation of law enforcement online and content moderation.

Anna Sophia is a Junior Researcher at the Leibniz-Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institute and PhD candidate at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Her fields of research include Internet Governance, the relationship of states, non-state actors and individuals on the internet, the international law of statehood and international legal theory. In her PhD she explores if a new contouring of our understanding of the state under international law is both possible and necessary in the age of the Internet.

Erik studied law at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, and the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is currently working as a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg. His research interests are Comparative European Constitutional Law, in particular European Constitutional Courts, and International Human Rights Law with a focus on the protection of human rights in the cyberspace.

Cathérine is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Academy for European Human Rights Protection (University of Cologne) and an affiliated researcher at the Human Rights Centre (University of Ghent). Her research is often socio-legal in nature and focuses on subjects such as procedural justice, perceived discrimination, Islamophobia as well as #MeToo and ‘Himpathy’. She follows the case law of the ECtHR and regularly contributes to third party interventions to the Court.

Nesa Zimmermann is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Geneva and Co-director of the Law Clinic for the Rights of Vulnerable Persons. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Geneva, a LL.M. from King’s College, London, and a MLaw from the University of Neuchâtel. Her fields of expertise include human rights law, migration law and constitutional law. Completed in 2020, her Ph.D. analyses particular aspects of vulnerability-reasoning in the caselaw of the ECtHR.

Daniela has been studying law at Humboldt University Berlin since 2018 and has been a student assistant in the team of Völkerrechtsblog since July 2020.