When rival Sudanese delegations arrived in Heidelberg in 2002, they refused even to share a hotel lobby. Three sleepless weeks later they walked out of the Max Planck Institute with a joint bill of rights that became the spine of Sudan’s 2005 Interim Constitution.

At the center was Rüdiger Wolfrum: international judge, peace-broker, and the first “outsider” ever hired to direct the institute. He insists academia should do more than publish; it should settle real disputes. “The Foreign Office never touched our text,” he recalls, proud of a process that mixed 3 a.m. draft sessions with feedback from chiefs, mayors, and imams.

Wolfrum emphasizes that the advisory group at these negotiations included acclaimed experts from both the Global South and North—among them Judge Tafsir Malick Ndiaye (Senegal), Judge Thomas A. Mensah (Ghana), Prince Raad bin Zeid (Jordan), Professor Fred Morrison (USA), and Ambassador Tono Eitel (Germany). Crucially, representatives from both Sudan and South Sudan were able to fully participate and shape the process. As Wolfrum notes, “A constitution that is imposed — or even merely feels imposed — can never achieve the acceptance necessary for its effectiveness.”

In this MPIL100 conversation with Moritz Vinken, Wolfrum explains how academia can host hard political talks, and why young scholars shouldn’t choose between rigor and relevance—they can, and must, deliver both.

About Rüdiger Wolfrum

As a lawyer, Rüdiger Wolfrum bridged courtroom, classroom, and conflict mediation. As president and long-serving judge of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, he helped shape modern maritime jurisprudence while directing the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg. A builder of legal knowledge infrastructures, he spearheaded the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law (MPEPIL) and the Journal of the History of International Law (JHIL), and advanced ideas like solidarity as a structural principle of international law. Beyond scholarship, he advised peace and constitution-making processes in Sudan, South Sudan, and Lebanon, designing inclusive, locally grounded negotiations. His work—a blend of doctrine and practice—has influenced courts, scholars, and policymakers, and continues through the Max Planck Foundation for International Peace and the Rule of Law.

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“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.

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Legal concepts rarely transfer neatly from one system to another. Over five decades at Heidelberg’s Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Karin Oellers-Frahm saw how familiar‑looking terms can have very different meanings across jurisdictions. Trained as a French‑Italian interpreter in the 1970s, she soon moved into international law, building a career that combined linguistic skill with deep engagement in comparative and public international law.

From co‑editing a leading commentary on the Statute of the International Court of Justice to witnessing the Institute’s shift from German‑only conferences to an English‑dominated discourse, she learned that true precision rests on cultural fluency as much as on translation. As machine translation advances and English becomes academia’s common language, she reflects with MPIL’s Carolyn Moser and Philipp Glahé on what may be lost — and why future international lawyers must master the legal cultures behind the words.

About Karin Oellers-Frahm

Karin Oellers-Frahm rose from interpreter training to become one of Germany’s quiet power brokers in international law. After stints translating at the nascent European Community, she joined Heidelberg’s Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in 1970—an uninvited female newcomer in a world of male jurists. There she helped turn dusty court files into living doctrine: her early thesis that provisional measures of the International Court of Justice must bind states later shaped ICJ jurisprudence. A polyglot with a taste for method, she co-edited the leading commentary on the Court’s Statute, steered the monumental “Fontes” case-law series and mentored generations through Jessup moot courts. Half a century on, alumni still carry the MPI imprint she personifies: rigor, linguistic precision, and an insistence that law’s global dialogue depends on culture as much as codes.

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“The library serves the institute”, says Joachim Schwietzke and unfolds a century‑spanning portrait of the MPIL’s collection: from Berlin Palace and a “central room” featuring a paper index, through wartime loss and postwar rescues, to Heidelberg’s systematically arranged library stacks stretching 43 kilometres. He argues that serious international and public law research rests on curated foundations: treaties, statute and case reports, parliamentary records, and the publications of the UN, EU, and League of Nations—framed by a General Section that puts law in dialogue with history, philosophy, sociology, and military and colonial studies.

About Joachim Schwietzke

Against keyword search, Schwietzke defends expert selection, multilingual breadth, and on‑site browsing—methods that keep scholarship anchored in sources and context, and keep the institute’s mission at the heart of the library.

Joachim Schwietzke, a lawyer turned librarian, helped shape one of the world’s preeminent specialist law libraries at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg. Joining the institute in 1975 and later serving as Library Director, he steered its transformation from paper indexes to digital systems while expanding a systematically arranged, closed‑stacks collection spanning international law, comparative public law, legal philosophy, and a striking General Section that embeds law in history, sociology, and military and colonial studies. A longtime leader in the International Association of Law Libraries, he also co‑authored widely used bibliographical compendia on diplomatic conferences and multilateral treaty practice (1641–1924), reference works that bridge archival rigor and scholarly utility.

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“You don’t always have to be right immediately,” reflects Juliane Kokott—advice that feels radical in today’s academic climate. While today’s emerging scholars often feel compelled to retreat from intellectual risk, Kokott’s path from Max Planck researcher to Europe’s longest-serving Advocate General reveals what intellectual courage actually looks like.

Her story begins in 1980s Heidelberg, where academic debates were “crushing” affairs that could end careers. Yet Kokott learned to separate personal worth from intellectual criticism. “If someone thinks the view is wrong, you just discuss it with the next person,” she explains. Her approach of waiting, reflecting, and returning with stronger arguments contrasts sharply with today’s publish-or-perish anxiety and social media pile-ons, so often felt as oppressive burdens by today’s younger scholars.

From handwritten manuscripts to digital courtrooms, from being one of two women among thirty men to shaping European law through 500-plus judicial opinions, Kokott’s career shows that intellectual resilience isn’t about armor—it’s about staying curious when others quit.

In conversation with MPIL’s Robert Stendel and Philipp Glahé, Kokott reveals precious, seemingly forgotten techniques of academic survival and why the next generation desperately needs to relearn them.

About Juliane Kokott

Juliane Kokott has carved an uncommon path from Heidelberg lecture halls to the bench of Europe’s highest court. A double-doctorate scholar with credentials from Harvard and Washington, she honed her comparative legal instincts during pivotal years at the Max Planck Institute for International Law, where she navigated country departments spanning Inter-American human rights to European Community law while becoming one of the first women to habilitate there.

She traded ivory-tower contemplation for frontline legal impact in 2003, when she became Advocate General at the Court of Justice of the European Union—only the third woman ever to hold the post and now its longest-serving voice. Her more than 500 influential opinions, spanning competition, tax and fundamental rights, are famed for crisp language and comparative depth rooted in her Max Planck training in empirical, cross-border legal analysis. Kokott balances scholarship—professorial stints across Germany and Switzerland, editorships and global tax projects—with a reputation for principled advocacy for gender equality. Colleagues call her the Court’s “comparative conscience,” a jurist who turns sprawling doctrine into pragmatic guidance for a rapidly integrating Europe.

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While students rioted in Heidelberg’s streets and police stormed lecture halls, Konrad Buschbeck spent nights on a leather sofa, keeping watch over the Institute’s precious library. “We lived in another world,” he recalls of the legal scholars who remained largely untouched by the 1968 upheaval raging just miles away.

From 1965-1970, Buschbeck inhabited this insulated academic haven—a tight-knit community of “male German jurists” where formal address was standard and soccer games fostered the only informality. The Institute’s researchers heard about protests like “war correspondents,” reporting back from the outside world while their own routines continued undisturbed.

This isolation reflected deeper patterns: a generation’s reluctance to confront the Nazi past of figures like Carl Schmitt, whose “fascinating” intellect Buschbeck had encountered firsthand. While revolution called for accountability, the Institute’s elite networks quietly prepared members for careers in government, diplomacy, and European institutions.

Buschbeck’s reflections reveal how academic privilege can create both opportunity and blind spots. His journey from this protected world to roles including Germany’s first Science Attaché to Poland illustrates the complex legacy of institutions that shaped postwar German elites while remaining largely detached from the social upheavals around them.

About Konrad Buschbeck

Konrad Buschbeck is a retired German diplomat and legal scholar who bridged law, science policy, and international relations. Born in 1938, he earned his doctorate at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (1965-1970) under Professor Karl Doehring.

His career exemplified the Institute’s “revolving door” function, transitioning from academia to high-level government roles. He served as legal counsel for the German Red Cross on Geneva Convention reforms and held positions in the Federal Ministry for Education and Research, Germany’s EU representation during enlargement.

His capstone role was as Germany’s first Science Attaché to Poland (post-1989), where he orchestrated the first official visit of a Max Planck Society president to Poland, advancing bilateral scientific cooperation during post-Cold War reconciliation. He received the Foundation for Polish Science’s Honorary Distinction for fostering German-Polish ties.

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“As a scholar, one is committed to truth,” says Professor Silja Vöneky—a guiding principle throughout her two decades at the intersection of law and ethics. Beginning at Heidelberg’s Max Planck Institute in 1995 with environmental law, Vöneky’s focus pivoted dramatically after 9/11. She controversially argued that the Geneva Conventions might apply to terrorism if state involvement could be proven.

Her career spans international law, bioethics, and most recently, the legal regulation of artificial intelligence—always prioritizing rigorous, principled debate over political convenience. Vöneky’s impact isn’t just academic: she’s brought theory into practice as a peace negotiator in Sudan and expert in Antarctic treaty talks.

In conversation with MPIL’s Silvia Steininger, Vöneky reflects on how academia itself has changed: from hierarchical meetings to more collaborative, interdisciplinary work. Her story illustrates the ongoing challenge for scholars—upholding foundational principles while adapting to a rapidly changing world.

The Interview was conducted in January 2025.

About Silja Vöneky

Professor Silja Vöneky is one of Germany’s most influential legal scholars at the crossroads of international law, ethics, and technology. As a judge on the Constitutional Court of Baden-Württemberg and Professor at the University of Freiburg, she has shaped thinking on the legal and ethical governance of AI and biotechnology. Vöneky’s career began with environmental law and expanded to global legal responses to terrorism after 9/11, where her rigorous, independent approach advanced the application of humanitarian principles. She has chaired major ethics councils, led interdisciplinary research from German and international platforms, and is known for bridging law, philosophy, and technical innovation. Her commitment to public service, mentorship, and truth has established her as a leading voice on how democracies confront the legal challenges brought about by rapid scientific and technological change.

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In this MPIL100 Conversation with Philipp Glahé and Robert Stendel, director emeritus Jochen Abr. Frowein recounts his history at the Institute, as senior research fellow and director, and the front-row seat to history his positions afforded him—from advising on Willy Brandt’s groundbreaking Ostpolitik treaties in Moscow and Warsaw to steering the European Commission of Human Rights through turbulent times. He delves into legal-intellectual battles at the Max Planck Institute, where his controversial thesis on the GDR as a “de facto regime” challenged orthodoxies and helped pave the way for German reunification. With candor, Frowein reflects on bridging academia and diplomacy, offering a master class on the ways principled scholarship can reshape nations and norms.

About Jochen Abr. Frowein

Professor Jochen Frowein is one of Germany’s leading experts in public international and constitutional law. Director of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (MPIL) from 1981 through 2002 and professor at Uni Heidelberg, he authored over 400 publications, including standard references on the European Convention on Human Rights and the status of aliens in law.

Beyond academia, Frowein shaped policy as a negotiator of the 1970 Moscow and Warsaw Treaties and as a longtime member and Vice-President of the European Commission of Human Rights. He also served as Vice-President of both the German Research Foundation and the Max Planck Society, and was a member of the EU “Three Wise Men” tasked with assessing Austrian sanctions in 2000.

Frowein’s global recognition includes election to the Institut de Droit international, vice-presidency of the International Commission of Jurists, several honorary doctorates, and Germany’s Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit.

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