“Talking about the law with non-lawyers is a democratic challenge”

Interview with the new co-director Nora Markard

Since June 2025, legal scholar Nora Markard has been the new co-director of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg ‘Legal Unity and Pluralism’. As an expert in international law, her work is often concerned with legal pluralism. She is also interested in the question of how social diversity is addressed in law. In addition, she constantly demonstrates the socially transformative power of law – be it through her involvement in non-profit organisations and initiatives, through her books and, last but not least, on her Instagram channel. In this interview, she talks about current developments in constitutional and international law and explains how she wants to bring her research focus to the Kolleg.

Professor Markard, you took over the directorship of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg ‘Legal Unity and Pluralism’ alongside Ulrike Ludwig on 1 June 2025. What excites you the most about the Kolleg?

The interdisciplinarity and the internationality! The Kolleg is a space for exchange for researchers from different disciplines who are interested in law. Opening up German legal research to interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspectives and the internationalisation of legal research have long been a concern of mine. I am therefore very much looking forward to working with Ulrike Ludwig to lead a project that is so rich in different perspectives.

I am fascinated by the idea that the simultaneity of legal unity and legal pluralism is a transhistorical and transregional constant that is constantly re-negotiated. Leaving behind the either/or allows for a nuanced examination that I expect will yield important insights.

Over the past year, I have also had the opportunity to get to know the Kolleg’s outstanding team, and I am very much looking forward to working with them.

What are you currently working on, and how will you incorporate this into the life of the Kolleg?

I will be primarily contributing current legal perspectives on international and constitutional law. In international law, there is only very limited centralised enforcement of jointly negotiated standards, meaning that different understandings develop at the national and regional levels. International legal regimes develop alongside one another in a largely uncoordinated manner and therefore often contain contradictory rules. This can also lead to conflicting judgments by different courts or adjudicatory bodies. The simultaneity of legal unity and legal pluralism is palpable here.

Substantively, I am particularly interested in how inequalities and discrimination are addressed in constitutional and human rights law and, more specifically, in anti-discrimination law, which corresponds well with the Kolleg’s research perspective of social diversity. And my human rights research interests are often linked to questions of legal anthropology.

You are also very active outside of the Kolleg and your work as a professor. In addition to research organisations, working groups and editorial offices, you are also a board member of the Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte (GFF). Can you tell us something about its work?

The Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte (Society for Civil Rights) uses strategic litigation to advocate for fundamental and human rights. This means that we look for the best possible cases in order to clarify a legal issue of great social importance. The idea is that others can then continue to work with this precedent.

And we have already won several constitutional complaints by these means. For example, following our line of argument, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled that German intelligence services are also bound by fundamental rights abroad – that was groundbreaking! In addition to fundamental rights in the digital society, our focus areas also include a strong civil society in our democracy as well as equal rights and social participation. I myself am particularly involved in equal pay cases.

You are known to a wider audience for your book Jura not alone (2024), written with journalist Ronen Steinke, where you gather ‘12 encouragements to change the world through law’. What motivated you to do this?

Law is generally considered to be dry, abstract and out of touch with real life – many people are put off by this. But practically all areas of our lives are structured by the law; if you want to understand why things are the way they are, there is often no way around the law. And if you want to change the law, you need to know how it works. That’s why it is important to me to talk about the law not only in specialised discourse, but also with non-lawyers, in a way that is as accessible as possible and makes people want to learn more. So what is indispensable in interdisciplinary contexts, such as the Kolleg, is also a democratic challenge.

Making the law understandable was a great motivation for my co-author Ronen Steinke, who also holds a doctorate in law, and myself when writing. In a time where people are increasingly disenchanted with politics, it was also important for us to show that it is possible to do something – and that the law can be an important tool for this.

The twelve book chapters therefore introduce the reader to twelve different areas of law – social law, labour law, criminal law, fundamental rights and so on. But not like a classic German textbook, with lots of technical definitions and cases where the characters are simply called ‘A’ and ‘B’. Instead, we used stories of current conflicts and real people who are trying to make a difference through and with the law, and they are often successful. Often these are just ordinary people who realise that the law is unjust and set about changing it. They often find particular strength in mobilising the law together with others, i.e. ‘not alone’. That is also a nice parallel to the Kolleg!

With the GFF, you demonstrate the transformative power of law in a very practical way. In what areas of society can the law make a difference?

I find the power of the law particularly obvious in the climate cases. For example, the German Federal Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights have ruled very clearly that governments are obliged to effectively protect the climate. And that has really helped to move things forward. Politicians tend to prefer kicking the can down the road, because they want to be re-elected and climate protection measures hurt now but don’t have any effects until later. Courts have a different time horizon, and they focus on the law. This makes them important veto players.

Legal arguments can also be particularly persuasive when there is political disagreement. At least as long as we can still agree that fundamental rights are important and that the government and authorities must abide by the law even if it gets in the way of their ideas.

As a lawyer, you often comment on day-to-day political developments. In Germany, many are concerned about the rise of the AfD, but an outright ban seems far off at the moment. In France, a criminal court has now revoked Marine Le Pen’s right to stand for election for five years for embezzling EU funds, meaning she will most likely not be allowed to stand in the next presidential elections. Has the French constitutional state shown a defensive side here that the German one lacks?

Something like that would also be possible here. For example, according to Article 18 of the Basic Law, the Federal Constitutional Court can declare the forfeiture of fundamental rights in the case of any person who has abused her fundamental rights ‘to fight against the free democratic basic order’. The right to stand for election can also be forfeited.

German law contains a whole range of important instruments for the protection of democracy; but they are not effective unless we use them. For example, I am truly stunned that all this time no one has yet seriously examined the chances of success of a ban – even though many MPs are expressing concern that, before applying for a ban, we should be really sure that it will work. So now, civil society organisations have started looking into this; the GFF is leading the project. The recently released report on the AfD from the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution is of course very helpful in this, but it doesn’t answer all the questions that arise in relation to a ban.

The strategy of waiting and ‘governing away’ the AfD has proven ineffective for several years now. Some federal states are already unable to govern in some areas as a result of the AfD’s strong election results. We cannot afford to wait for that to also happen at the federal level.

Since the US foreign policy shift under President Trump, compliance with international law seems to be going out of fashion. Most recently, Hungary was the first European country to announce its intention to withdraw from the International Criminal Court. What are we currently experiencing in the area of international law?

We have been observing this trend for some time now. Under the PiS government, Poland has openly opposed the European Court of Human Rights. Russia openly broke international law back in 2014 with its annexation of Crimea. And the US intervention policy has long disregarded the rights of other states and human rights.

The International Criminal Court has seen several resignations already. This was partly due to the accusation that it was biased against African states. This is not entirely accurate; while the first cases did come from African countries, they were submitted to the Court by the governments themselves. But the backlash has now definitely taken on a new dimension. The US has imposed sanctions against the Court’s staff, and at the same time German Chancellor Merz has announced that he will not honour his duty to enforce the international arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu for war crimes if and when he visits Germany. This open opposition to international law, even in our country, worries me greatly.

American universities are also coming under massive pressure under Trump. You yourself are often at Columbia University in New York. How do you perceive the situation there?

US universities are more pluralistic than is perceived from the outside; there are definitely also conservatives working there. But President Trump seems to want to bring the universities completely into line. And that is diametrically opposed to the principles of academic freedom.

Universities must remain places where opposing positions remain in dialogue with each other. This is exhausting, and it can be painful. There cannot be room for hate speech or even violence, of course; but it is dangerous when people shut up in the very place where ideas are supposed to be exchanged. There are various reasons why this is happening. The financial sanctions against universities are exorbitant, and their employees are also put under massive pressure on social media if they stand up for the rights of protesting students, for example. But you really don’t have to agree with the protests in every respect to have a problem with how rigorously universities are dealing with them.

Another project is that all legal measures to promote diversity are to be abolished. This means that universities will once again become primarily a place for the strong, who are already in the majority in society. This is also bad for research, because we will be missing unique perspectives and the specific research questions that they engender.

But we don’t just have to look to the US; here in Germany, too, universities sometimes deal with protests disproportionately. Students are being denied spaces to hold discussions, conferences are being cleared by the police, there are discussions about disenrolling students. But we need these discussions, and they are also an opportunity for universities to show how they can be held without such confrontations. Repression really must remain the last resort, for particularly extreme excesses.

Should academia in Germany also commit itself more strongly to basic democratic values?

Yes. Absolutely. It is not enough to wave flags on Constitution Day. Democracy and fundamental rights must be practiced every day.

As one of its first official acts, the new federal government has tightened checks at Germany’s borders and is also turning back asylum seekers. This procedure has just been found unlawful by the Berlin Administrative Court.

This is yet another example of politicians recklessly overstepping the boundaries of the law and thereby setting a dangerous precedent. Chancellor Merz has a law degree, he knows very well that the pushbacks he promised violate European law. He has now had this explained to him once again and in detail by the Berlin Administrative Court. He and his Interior Minister Dobrindt still want to stick to the policy.

This uncompromising stance creates an open tension with the law. After all, the invocation of the European ‘emergency clause’ in Article 72 TFEU is unlikely to work, given everything the European Court of Justice has said about that provision so far. And if Germany no longer thinks it needs to comply with EU law, why should the other member states do so?

The interview was conducted in writing. The questions were posed by Lennart Pieper.

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Cite as:

Nora Markard/Lennart Pieper: “Talking about the law with non-lawyers is a democratic challenge”. Interview, EViR Blog, 04.06.2025, https://www.evir.uni-muenster.blog/en/interviewmarkard/

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