Philipp Dann is a professor at Humboldt University in Berlin, where he holds the chair in public and comparative law and currently serves as Dean of the School of Law. He received his education at Humboldt University (state examination), the University of Frankfurt (Ph.D. and habilitation), and Harvard Law School (Master’s degree), he served as a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, and as a visiting scholar at New York University (Emile Noel Fellow), the Georgetown Law Center in Washington, D.C., and the National Law School in Bangalore.
Philipp Dann is the author of three monographs, 12 edited volumes, and more than 60 articles in German and English. He is editor-in-chief of the quarterly journal World Comparative Law and regularly advises governments and other parties on constitutional issues and matters of law and development. He has taught at various universities in Germany, India, and France, and in 2024–2025, he gave masterclasses at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg as well as in London, Delhi, Bogotá, and Ibadan (Nigeria).
Dann works in the fields of public international, comparative, German, and European law, drawing on political and legal theory and incorporating historical and empirical perspectives. His main areas of research are the law of democracy, federalism, development finance, and temporality. His work focuses primarily on the role of law in the encounter and interplay between the Global South and the Global North. Through his writings and collaborative research projects, he has brought new momentum to the question of how law has shaped, has been shaped by, and continues to shape international relations—particularly from a South-North perspective—notably through colonialism and its legacy. He is currently exploring the possibilities (and pitfalls) of reinventing public law and its theory in the 20th century through a colonial lens and is examining how to rethink public law and the role of legal research from a truly global perspective, taking into account the broader legacies of modernity and colonialism.
Philipp Dann’s academic activities are characterized by collaborations that are often transnational in scope. In particular, he serves as coordinator of the World Comparative Law Network and the law and politics section of the Indian European Advanced Research Network (IEARN), co-spokesperson for the German branch of ICON-S, co-founder of the Law and Development Research Network (LDRN), and principal investigator within the research group “Contestations of the Liberal Script.” In 2025, he founded the Center for Advanced Studies “Reflexive Globalization and the Law: Colonial Legacies and Their Implications in the 21st Century” at Humboldt University ( https://reflex.hu-berlin.de/ ).