Prof. Dr. Andreas Fischer-Lescano

If contradictions are not errors of thought but are woven into the social, this has implications for understanding normativity. As a professor of public law, European law, international law and legal theory, I am interested in the question of how social contradictions are reflected in law and what forms contradiction takes in law.

The very existence of the legal category “conflict of laws” and of “conflicts of fundamental rights” make it clear that dealing with contradictions, collisions, paradoxes and antinomies is commonplace in law. With the interdisciplinary reflection on contradiction in the context of Contradiction Studies, I hope to find answers to fundamental questions of law. In jurisprudence there is classically a confrontation between systems thinking, which assumes a norm-hierarchically structured unity of law, and more pluralistically arguing approaches, which question this unity and the leges hierarchy. The jurisprudential discussions that start here concern national law, supranational Union law, and international law in equal measure. In all legal systems, the question of internal coherence and interlegal openness arises. As a rule, the theoretical debates in legal practice run along in the background, but especially as a result of the transnationalization of law, the question of how law can and should adequately deal with collisions, contradictions, and tensions (within and between orders) is becoming more acute in legal practice and legal scholarship. I welcome all project proposals from doctoral students that combine legal dogmatic questions with theoretical reflection on the contradictions of law.

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name contradiction

“Contradiction becomes real where someone names contradiction.”

Ingo H. Warnke
city

“The city is a laboratory not only of modernity, but also of contradiction.”

Julia Lossau
Bhabha on enlightenment and coloniality

“Homi Bhabha says about the contradiction between the ideals of the enlightenment, claims to democracy and solidarity and simultaneous colonization and ongoing coloniality: ‘That ideological tension, visible in the history of the West as a despotic power, at the very moment of the birth of democracy and modernity, has not been adequately written in a contradictory and contrapuntal discourse of tradition.’”

Kerstin Knopf
sustained engagement

“The history of Western philosophy can be understood as a sustained engagement with contradiction.”

Norman Sieroka
ideal of a contradiction-free world

“Science has long been animated by the ideal of a contradiction-free world in which logical orders could merge with society, politics, culture and language. In the GRC Contradiction Studies we are working on ways of describing the multiplicity and complexity, the danger and beauty of our worlds that clearly go beyond concepts of freedom from contradiction.”

Michi Knecht