International Master's Programme – LLM in Legal Theory

This programme engages with the rapid digitalisation and use of AI and the connected structural transformation of normativity in law. It introduces both the Anglo-American Common Law and the Civil or Continental Law tradition of legal theory. Its focus is to safeguard European traditions as the basis of constitutionalism in a global perspective, developing legal scholarship and jurisprudence as a science, and developing jurisprudence as applied legal theory so as to enable students to solve system conflicts. Such conflicts occur regularly because national law is becoming supra-, inter- and transnational and because of the growing weight of transnational law-making on the part of non-state actors. This is reflected in the unique European design of the programme. Moreover, it offers an excellent institutional setting on the impressive and charming Westend campus of Goethe University Frankfurt. The programme's exclusive concentration on legal theory makes it unique in the field of advanced legal studies in Europe, enabled by the university cluster of EALT. It rests on synergies between three institutions located on the same campus: a large law faculty, the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory (www.lhlt.mpg.de/en), the Normative Orders Research Centre (www.normativeorders.net) targeting at the integration of all Frankfurt social sciences with the focus on normativity, and the House of Finance (Institute for Law and Finance, www.ilf-frankfurt.de). It also connects the reputation of Goethe University (GU) with that of other renowned German and European universities. Besides GU, the partners in the programme are the universities of Bologna (and EUI Florence), Krakow, Glasgow, Lucerne, Stockholm, and associate partners. Further associated partners contribute in a specific way within the activities of the "Third Term Network", namely, in the supervision of students' Master's theses. They currently include renowned instructors from the universities of Glasgow and Oxford, Lucerne, Stockholm, and further universities as in Barcelona, Belgrade, Palermo, Torino, and others. In addition, a close cooperation exists with the International Association for Legal and Social Philosophy (IVR). The programme also has ties to major legal theory scholars at German universities such as Freiburg, Göttingen, Hamburg, and Munich.