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W&L Law and the German Law Journal Welcome Prof. Nora Markard as a W&L Global Teaching Fellow Prof. Markard will contribute to the law school’s comparative law seminar, which surveys German law and legal culture.

Nora_Markard_22313843582-800x533 W&L Law and the German Law Journal Welcome Prof. Nora Markard as a W&L Global Teaching FellowProf. Nora Markard

Prof. Nora Markard of the University of Münster Law Faculty (Germany) will join the W&L Law School community this fall as a W&L Global Teaching Fellow.

Prof. Markard will contribute to the law school’s comparative law seminar, which surveys German law and legal culture.  The seminar, which will be co-taught by W&L Law Professor Russell Miller, attracts many of the students who serve as Student Editors for the German Law Journal.

“Prof. Markard is one of Germany’s most respected and inspiring scholars and teachers of public law,” said Prof. Miller.  “We are very lucky to have attracted her to W&L.  She’ll enrich our students immensely.”

Prof. Nora Markard is a professor of Public Law and Human Rights at the University of Münster.  She studied law at the Free University of Berlin and the Sorbonne in Paris.  She holds a M.A. in International Peace & Security from King’s College London as well as a Ph.D in law from Humboldt University in Berlin.  Prof. Markard’s areas of expertise include comparative and German constitutional law, international human rights law, international and European migration and refugee law, and legal gender studies. She co-founded the Humboldt Law Clinic for Fundamental and Human Rights as well as the Refugee Law Clinic at the University of Hamburg.

Prof. Markard’s recent publications have positioned her as a leader in Germany on issues of diversity and discrimination.  Her recent book Diversität in Rechtswissenschaft und Rechtspraxis (Diversity in Legal Academia and Practice) (2021) was a first-of-its-kind critique of the German legal academy’s and legal profession’s poor records with diversity and inclusion.  She also is the author of a commentary on the German Basic Law’s non-discrimination clauses, co-authored with Constitutional Court Justice Susanne Baer, and the book chapter “Struktureller und institutioneller Rassismus: Eine juristische Perspektive” (“Structural and Institutional Racism: A Legal Perspective”) forthcoming in the edited volume Grundgesetz und Rassismus (The Basic Law and Racism) (2022).

Besides her scholarly work, Prof. Markard is an experienced advocate for civil rights.  She is a founding executive board member of the strategic litigation NGO “Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte” (Society for Civil Rights), which has already won several major Federal Constitutional Court cases.  She is counsel of record in an equal pay case pending before the Constitutional Court, and she is currently leading the submission of a third-party intervention before the European Court of Human Rights on so-called “migrant push-backs” at sea.

Prof. Markard is a member of the Editorial Board of the German Law Journal.  Founded by Prof. Miller, the German Law Journal is the world’s leading forum for scholarship from a transnational perspective and about European law.  The Journal was a pioneer in online and open-access formats.  Student Editors based at the W&L Law School take a leading role in managing, editing, and administering this successful global scholarly platform.  Miller explained that Prof. Markard’s residency has the added benefit that “her affiliation with the GLJ gives the Student Editors the chance to meet and work closely with one of the Journal’s leading personalities.”

Prof. Markard has extensive academic experience in the United States.  She has been a visiting fellow at the University of Michigan and Columbia Law School.

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