The third Approaches to Legal Research programme took place at Harnack House in Berlin on 29–30 April 2026. Organized for researchers across Max Planck Law, it brought together twenty-six participants and eight session leaders for two days of teaching and discussion on legal research methods, perspectives, and their limits. The programme was opened by the Chair of Max Planck Law, Professor Anne Röthel.
Following the opening, Dr Alexandra Mercescu (University of Timișoara) began with a session on the merits and limits of interdisciplinary research. She showed that interdisciplinarity is not simply the addition of external knowledge to law, but a disciplined way of asking when legal reasoning needs help from other forms of knowledge. Her session invited participants to think more carefully about law’s boundaries, and about the institutional, historical, and intellectual habits that make those boundaries appear natural.
Dr Rachel Pougnet and Dr Hélène Quiniou then addressed socio-legal studies and legal anthropology. Their session treated law not only as a body of norms, but as a set of practices, relationships, institutions, and forms of authority. They made clear that these approaches can make visible the distance between law’s formal self-description and the way it is experienced, used, or resisted in social life.
Dr Ralf Seinecke followed with a session on doctrinal legal method, which made German legal reasoning conscious as a method rather than merely a professional habit. Although doctrinal method is something all German lawyers do, the German lawyers in the room still appreciated seeing made explicit what they had learned subconsciously through practice. Non-German participants and non-lawyers also valued the clarification, particularly because it showed both the rationality and the limits of doctrinal work.
At the end of the first day, Dr Sven Hoeppner (Charles University) introduced law and economics as a way of analysing how legal rules shape behaviour. The session’s strength was to show that economic reasoning does not need to displace legal reasoning, but can expose the incentives and assumptions that legal rules create. Examples from contract law made clear that legal norms operate not only through doctrine, but also through expectations, incentives, and behavioural responses.
On the second day, Dr Michel Erpelding presented legal history as both a field and a method. His session emphasized that legal sources are not neutral deposits of information, but materials produced for particular purposes, audiences, and institutional settings. Reading them historically therefore means paying attention not only to what they say, but also to context, silence, translation, and contingency.
Professor Sabrina Ragone (University of Bologna) | followed with a session on comparative law, in which she emphasized comparison as a demanding form of legal self-reflection. Foreign law cannot simply be cited as an additional authority; it must be understood in context and with awareness of methodological bias. The session showed that comparison is most valuable when it unsettles familiar assumptions rather than confirms them too easily.
In the last teaching session, Dr Melanie Merlin de Andrade framed legal theory as a methodological resource. She showed that every research project presupposes an understanding of what law is, whether or not that assumption is made explicit. Legal theory therefore helps researchers clarify the concepts, sources, and claims on which their projects depend.
A final round table brought the sessions leaders and the participants together in comparing approaches, questions, and research practices. It concluded the programme well, helping participants see how the different methods could speak to one another, and offering practical orientation for their own projects.
The programme was well received by participants. As Otava Piha said, it was ‘an opportunity for me to get support from the community for my chosen approaches to law and get reinforcement that my approaches are valuable’. Maria Diory Rabajante added that it gave her ‘the confidence and vocabulary to better articulate the things that I’ve been thinking about’