Cultural Diversity in Private Law
The group’s leader, Mareike Schmidt, has been working on questions of cultural diversity in private law for several years. Her current personal and group projects sharpen this focus.
1. The Role of Culture in Core Areas of German Private Law
- Duration: 2019–2025
- Partially funded by a fellowship from the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture”, Bonn (10/2021–03/2022)
This project explores cultural and religious diversity in a field of law in which it is almost entirely unexplored thus far, i.e., in the law of contracts, torts, property and other commercially oriented fields of the German Civil Code. In order to assess the practical relevance of questions of cultural and religious diversity in these fields, the heart of this project involves mapping the occurrence and handling of such aspects in court practice. To achieve this, Schmidt combines content analysis (a social science method) with foundational and doctrinal approaches to law, thereby also enriching the scope of traditional legal research methods.
2. CUREDI – Cultural and Religious Diversity under State Law across Europe
Since 2020, Mareike Schmidt has been a partner in the CUREDI project, contributing commentaries on German court decisions regarding the law of obligations and property law. She is also a member of the project’s Editorial Board and Coordination Team.
3. Cultural Embeddedness of the Law of Obligations
- Duration: 2024–2028
Exploring the cultural embeddedness of the law of obligations forms one of the research group’s key projects. The aim is to contribute to improving legal doctrine and practice regarding the application of the law of obligations (primarily on contracts and torts) in culturally diverse societies. The project starts from the conviction that handling cultural diversity and achieving a just and inclusive application of the law of obligations must go beyond reasonable accommodation of ‘the other’ by, for instance, granting exceptions from the usual rules to persons ‘from other cultures’. We seek both to understand from a theoretical perspective how the application of the law of obligations is (often imperceptibly) shaped by conceptions of normality shared by the majoritarian society and to empirically investigate how legal professionals (primarily judges and attorneys) deal with this cultural embeddedness in their respective disputes. On this basis, we will then examine the potential for and the limits of including cultural diversity – in other words, to sound out the options for a culturally sensitive application of the law of obligations.
The project is situated at the intersection of doctrinal law, legal theory, and empirical legal research. In terms of theory, we intend to merge two important discussions: (1) the discourse on law as culture, along with other theoretical and doctrinal perspectives that can help in ascertaining the cultural embeddedness of the law of obligations and its application; and (2) the search for reasonable accommodation of cultural diversity in the law of obligations. The empirical component of the project will investigate how legal professionals deal with the cultural embeddedness of the law of obligations in their practice. This shall be done using various qualitative methods, including analysis of court case files and interviews with legal professionals.
The results of the project are expected to provide a basis for the development of legal doctrine and methods of adjudication suitable for culturally diverse societies, with a particular view to enabling a more reflexive practice with regard to the positionality of law and legal professionals. In a broader context, the project thus addresses fundamental questions of integration and equal chances of participation for all members of culturally diverse societies.