Dr. Corinna Coupette, alumna and former doctoral candidate at Bucerius Law School, was awarded the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society for her dissertation “Juristische Netzwerkforschung (Legal Network Science)”. The Otto Hahn Medal is awarded annually for outstanding dissertations written within the Max Planck Society. Corinna Coupette produced the award-winning work in her time as a research associate of the Otto Hahn Group on Financial Regulation at the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance. Her dissertation was supervised by Professor Dr. Christian Bumke, and it won the Bucerius Law School dissertation award in 2018.
Legal Network Science – Mapping the Law
With her dissertation, Corinna Coupette introduces legal network science to the German legal discourse. Lawyers interact with networks on a daily basis, for example when they search for information or accompany corporate transactions. In doing so, they also produce networks themselves – especially social networks and citation networks. Corinna Coupette studies how legal phenomena can be represented as networks and investigates what we can learn from their analysis. Based on a specially compiled data set of decisions of the Federal Constitutional Court, she develops tools for modeling, measuring, and mapping the law. She acquired the necessary knowledge by studying computer science in parallel to her doctorate.
Interdisciplinary Research Continues
Today, Corinna Coupette is a research associate at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, where she is pursuing her doctorate in computer science. She is also an affiliate of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law and a guest at the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance. At Bucerius Law School, she is currently continuing the research begun in her dissertation under the auspices of the interdisciplinary program on legal research.
The award-winning work was published in 2019 by Mohr Siebeck and is open access. The eBook (German language) can be downloaded free of charge.
