Volkmar Gessner (9 October 1937 – 8 November 2014) was a German university professor and a socio-legal scholar.
Volkmar Gessner (9 October 1937 – 8 November 2014) was a German university professor and a socio-legal scholar.
Gessner studied sociology and law at the University of Munich. He received a doctorate in law from the University of Münster (1969) and the habilitation from the faculty of sociology of the University of Bielefeld. After serving as a civil judge in Münster and Recklinghausen, he worked at the Max Planck Institut für ausländisches und internationales Privatrecht in Hamburg, where he headed a social science working group after 1975. In 1980, Gessner was appointed professor of Sociology of Law, Comparative Law and European Legal Policy at the University of Bremen. From 1980 to 1990, he also served as one of the directors of the newly founded Zentrum für Europäische Rechtspolitik in Bremen (Center for European Legal Policy). From 1997 to 1999, he was a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. After his retirement from the University of Bremen in 2003, he served until 2005 as Scientific Director of the International Institute for the Sociology of Law in Oñati, Spain.
The University of Münster is a public university located in the city of Münster, North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany.
Hamburg is the second-largest city in Germany with a population of over 1.8 million.
The University of Bremen is a public university in Bremen, Germany, with approximately 23,500 people from 115 countries. It is one of 11 institutions which were successful in the category "Institutional Strategies" of the Excellence Initiative launched by the Federal Government and the Federal States in 2012. The university was also successful in the categories "Graduate Schools" and "Clusters of Excellence" of the initiative.
Both in his publications and organizational work, Gessner made major contributions to the development of contemporary sociology of law. In 1988 as the then secretary of the Research Committee on Sociology of Law, he was instrumental in setting up the International Institute for the Sociology of Law (IISL). [1] and was specifically involved in creating its International Master's Programme in Sociology of Law in 1990. [2] His academic publications focus on conflict resolution through law, on legal cultures and on the importance of legal certainty in a globalized world. For his achievements, he received the Adam Podgòrecki price of the RCSL in 2013 [3]
The sociology of law is often described as a sub-discipline of sociology or an interdisciplinary approach within legal studies. Some see sociology of law as belonging "necessarily" to the field of sociology, but others tend to consider it a field of research caught up between the disciplines of law and sociology. Still others regard it neither a subdiscipline of sociology nor a branch of legal studies but as a field of research on its own right within the broader social science tradition. Accordingly, it may be described without reference to mainstream sociology as "the systematic, theoretically grounded, empirical study of law as a set of social practices or as an aspect or field of social experience". It has been seen as treating law and justice as fundamental institutions of the basic structure of society mediating "between political and economic interests, between culture and the normative order of society, establishing and maintaining interdependence, and constituting themselves as sources of consensus, coercion and social control".
Research Committee on Sociology of Law (RCSL) was established in 1962 by William M. Evan and Adam Podgórecki, with the support of Renato Treves during the Congress of the International Sociological Association (ISA), which was held in Weshington D. C. Treves was elected as the first president of the RCSL, Podgórecki as the vice-president and Evan as the Secretary. The RCSL aimed at "opening up a broader range of opportunities for the participation of individual members in the activities of the Association in the field of sociology of law".
The International Institute for the Sociology of Law (IISL) in Oñati is the only international establishment which is entirely devoted to teaching and promoting the sociology of law, socio-legal studies, and law and society research.
The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is a numeric commercial book identifier which is intended to be unique. Publishers purchase ISBNs from an affiliate of the International ISBN Agency.
Niklas Luhmann was a German sociologist, philosopher of social science, and a prominent thinker in systems theory, who is considered one of the most important social theorists of the 20th century.
Legal positivism is a school of thought of analytical jurisprudence largely developed by legal thinkers in the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Jeremy Bentham and John Austin. While Bentham and Austin developed legal positivist theory, empiricism set the theoretical foundations for such developments to occur. The most prominent legal positivist writer in English has been H. L. A. Hart, who, in 1958, found common usages of "positivism" as applied to law to include the contentions that:
Leon Petrazycki was a Russian and Polish philosopher, legal scholar and sociologist. He is considered one of the important forerunners of the sociology of law.
Johannes Feest is a German penologist and sociologist of law. He studied law in Vienna (Austria) and Munich (Germany) and sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. From 1974 until his retirement in 2005 he was professor of criminal law at the University of Bremen (Germany). From 1995 to 1997 he directed the International Institute for the Sociology of Law in Oñati. He has done research on the courts, police and prisons. Presently, he is primarily engaged with German prison policy. He is the brother of Christian Feest and Gerhard Gleich.
Roland Kirstein is a German economist and professor of Business Administration at the Otto-von-Guericke-University in Magdeburg, Germany.
Winfried Brugger was Professor of Public Law, Philosophy of Law and Theory of State at Heidelberg University.
Rüdiger Lautmann is a German professor of sociology and one of the most prominent LGBT scholars in Germany.
William L. F. Felstiner, usually known as Bill Felstiner, is a socio-legal scholar.
Gregory Shaffer is a leading scholar of the World Trade Organization, of law and globalization, and of transnational legal orders and legal ordering, working in the tradition of legal realism and socio-legal studies. He introduced the concept of public-private partnerships in the WTO dispute settlement system, examining how they work in practice in the United States, the European Union and Brazil. He also has written major books on the international law and politics governing genetically modified foods, transatlantic relations, and transnational legal orders. Shaffer is a Chancellor's Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. He has previously been the Melvin C. Steen Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School, held the first Chair at Loyola University Chicago School of Law, and was a Professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, where he was Co-Director of the Center on World Affairs and the Global Economy. He serves as the Senior Research Fellow at the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD) for its project on WTO Dispute Settlement and Developing Countries, and served on the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law. He received his B.A. from Dartmouth College and his J.D. from Stanford Law School.
New legal realism (NLR) is an emerging school of thought in American legal philosophy.
Reza Banakar is an Iranian-born Professor of Legal Sociology at Lund University, Sweden. Before joining Lund in 2013, he was Professor of Socio-Legal Studies at the Department of Advanced Legal Studies at the University of Westminster, London.
He was born in Shiraz (Iran) and moved to England in the 1970s, where he went to school and studied mathematics.
Adam Podgórecki (1925–1998) is a sociologist and one of the founders of the Research Committee on Sociology of Law. Podgórecki was also one of the founders of the first institute at Warsaw University which was devoted to the social scientific studies of law. He moved to Carlton University in Ottawa, Canada, and took up a Chair in sociology and anthropology, when the communists expelled him from his professorship for "anti-communist academic activities". "He worked tirelessly and fearlessly" to ensure the independence of the sociology of law "against the pull of the large disciplines of sociology on the one side and law on the other" and became one of the pioneers of the sociology of law after World War II.
Ralf Koelbel is professor of criminology, criminal law and criminal proceedings law at Bielefeld University.
Mavis Maclean, CBE, FRSA, FAcSS has carried out socio-legal research at Oxford since 1974, and in 2001 founded the Oxford Centre for Family Law and Policy (OXFLAP).
Gloria Amparo Rodríguez is a Colombian legal scholar and environmentalist. Rodríguez is currently director and professor of law at the Public Law Research Group at Universidad del Rosario, a senior fellow at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law, and adjunct judge of the Constitutional Court of Colombia.
Anne Sophia-Marie van Aaken is a German lawyer and economist, who is a full Professor of Law and Economics, Legal Theory, Public International Law and European Law at the University of Hamburg.
Erhard Blankenburg was a German sociologist, specializing in the sociology of law.