Russell Miller Awarded Prestigious Volkswagen Foundation Transatlantic Bridge Professorship The three-year fellowship will support research and collaboration at one of Germany's leading law faculties.

By Law Communications
July 14, 2026

Professor Russell Miller

Russell Miller, the J.B. Stombock Professor of Law at Washington and Lee, has been selected to receive a prestigious Transatlantic Bridge Professorship from the Volkswagen Foundation, one of Europe’s leading research funding organizations. The highly competitive fellowship supports internationally recognized scholars whose work advances research on democracy, constitutionalism, fundamental rights, and transatlantic relations while fostering sustained collaboration between American and German universities.

Beginning in 2027, Miller will spend three summers in residence at the University of Freiburg in Germany while maintaining his faculty appointment at Washington and Lee. During the three-year professorship, he will pursue an ambitious research agenda exploring how constitutional values are understood differently across the United States and Europe and how a better understanding of those differences can help to strengthen the transatlantic partnership.

The Volkswagen Foundation established the Transatlantic Bridge Professorships program to reinforce academic ties between Germany and the United States at a moment of profound geopolitical change. The program supports distinguished scholars in the humanities and social sciences whose research contributes to democratic resilience, academic freedom, and transatlantic cooperation.

Miller’s project, “Transatlantic Constitutionalism: Between Civilization and Culture,” examines the constitutional traditions that have shaped the transatlantic community while acknowledging the important legal, historical, and cultural differences that distinguish American and European approaches to democracy, the rule of law, and individual rights. Rather than treating those differences as obstacles, the project argues that understanding them is essential to sustaining meaningful cooperation between democratic societies.

“Recent political tensions have exposed deep strains in the relationship between the United States and Europe,” said Miller. “The project aims to show that constitutional differences are not signs of failure, but part of what makes the transatlantic relationship complex, challenging, and worth sustaining.”

Hosted by the University of Freiburg’s Faculty of Law and its Centre for Interdisciplinary Constitutional Studies (FreiCIC), Miller’s research will combine constitutional law with the consideration of history, politics, literature, religion, and the arts to reveal how democratic societies interpret shared constitutional principles in different ways. The project includes annual graduate teaching in Freiburg, a transatlantic lecture series, collaborative law-and-culture programming, faculty exchanges with Washington and Lee, an international symposium, and publications.

University of Freiburg administrators and faculty offered an enthusiastic endorsement of Miller’s selection, describing him as “one of his generation’s most prominent and productive transatlanticists.”

“No one can be more thoroughly aligned with the aims of the program,” wrote Jan Felix Hoffmann, Dean of the University of Freiburg Faculty of Law, endorsing Miller’s selection. “The rich program of research and teaching Professor Miller anticipates will profoundly contribute to a mutual – and informed – understanding between American and German jurists and policymakers.”

Miller is internationally recognized for his scholarship on German constitutional law, comparative constitutionalism, and transatlantic legal relations. In 2021, he received the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award, one of Germany’s highest honors for international scholars, recognizing both his research achievements and his longstanding contributions to strengthening German-American academic relations. He is the co-founder of the German Law Journal, one of the world’s leading publications in comparative and transnational legal scholarship, and he is the author of the recent Cambridge University Press textbook An Introduction to German Law and Legal Culture.

The Transatlantic Bridge Professorship allows Miller and the Washington and Lee University School of Law to deepen institutional ties with the prestigious University of Freiburg Law Faculty. Freiburg Prof. Paulina Starski recently served as the W&L/German Law Journal Global Teaching Fellow. Miller recently co-taught a week-long block seminar in Switzerland with Freiburg Law Professor and former Constitutional Court Justice Johannes Masing. Three W&L students traveled to Europe to participate in the program. And Miller cooperates annually with Freiburg Prof. Jan Henrik Klement to offer a block seminar that presents German law and legal culture from an external perspective. Further opportunities for faculty and student collaboration are expected as a result of the award. All of this builds on W&L Law’s longstanding engagement with international legal scholarship.

Prof. Miller at the Annual Freiburg Introduction to German Law Seminar, Winter 2025

Prof. Miller, Freiburg Prof. Masing, W&L law student Griffin Boutwell, and Free University of Berlin history student Leander Roettger at the Switzerland Block Seminar, Spring 2026