“I find it difficult to draw such a clear line,” reflects Armin von Bogdandy on the moral dilemma that has haunted intellectuals for generations: engage with problematic power, or preserve principle through withdrawal?
Von Bogdandy, a director at MPIL and a recipient of Germany’s Leibniz Prize, uses a century of institutional memory to probe this tension. Through the triptych in the Institute’s entrance hall, he traces how Germany’s military defeats reshaped legal scholarship — from nationalist instrumentalism to European integration and constitutional jurisprudence.
This conversation with historian Philipp Glahé draws uncomfortable parallels between past and present: Institute colleagues who collaborated with Nazi authorities alongside those who joined the resistance, mirrored by contemporary scholars’ dilemmas over engaging controversial governments. “These are very difficult situations,” he acknowledges, refusing easy moral categories.
As institutional memory fades — over half of today’s staff are under 35 — von Bogdandy challenges academic orthodoxies, arguing that the Institute’s strength lies less in a shared identity than in productive disagreement, and showing why the choice between engagement and principle transcends any single historical moment.
About Armin von Bogdandy
Armin von Bogdandy is director at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, pairing rigorous theory with engagement in constitutional and rule‑of‑law crises. He helped coin influential frameworks — “international public authority,” analysing how actors like the OECD shape national policy through information, and “transformative constitutionalism,” advancing regional human rights–driven change in Latin America. He has contributed legal analyses and proposals that inform EU debates on democratic backsliding. A recipient of multiple honorary doctorates, he exemplifies the scholar‑practitioner: multilingual, philosophically trained, and comparative in outlook. His work insists that law’s deepest questions transcend borders — and that answering them demands both conceptual ambition and institutional craftsmanship.
