Hanjo Hamann is Rising Researcher of the Year 2020

March 23, 2021

Hanjo Hamann is the first legal scholar to receive the academics.de Junior Award and is named Rising Researcher of the Year 2020. This prize is awarded by the German University Association (Deutscher Hochschulverband) during the "Gala of German Science" for outstanding commitment to science and research. The jury was particularly impressed by the successful combination of law and linguistics using quantitative methods. This year, the event will take place as an online event on May 31.

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Hamann, who holds doctorates in law and economics, conducts research at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn and works as an adjunct lecturer at the Free University of Berlin. In addition to these two places, he has taught at the universities of Bremen, Gießen, Mannheim, Siegen, Zurich and Chengdu (China). Hamann's teaching and research focuses on contract and corporate law, with a particular emphasis on digital transformation and data-driven methods. His pioneering studies combine legal questions with methods of empirical legal research, law and economics, and legal corpus linguistics.

With his "evidence-based jurisprudence", he established a unique approach to law that helps to integrate empirical and interdisciplinary research. For this research, the leading law school in the US has awarded him a graduate degree in the "Science of Law", and the world association of University-Based Institutes for Advanced Study (UBIAS) appointed him to its Intercontinental Academia on "Laws: Complexity and Dynamics". In addition, Hamann works with children and young people on a voluntary basis, engages in the area of copyright law (open access), and serves as an academy fellow of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

"The fascinating thing about Hanjo Hamann is that he is both an excellent lawyer and a competent language scholar. How he combines these two different disciplines to arrive at new insights has truly impressed the jury," says Rainer Esser, Managing Director of the ZEIT publishing group.

The academics Rising Researcher Award, which is endowed with 5,000 Euros, is presented for the fourteenth time. The prize honors young researchers who have made a lasting contribution to their respective fields through pioneering research achievements, and who have also distinguished themselves through their exemplary actions and voluntary commitment to science. Last year's Rising Researcher of the Year was Professor Dr Andreas Vogelsang, junior professor for automotive software engineering and group leader for software engineering at the Daimler Center for Automotive Information Technology Innovations (DCAITI) at the Technical University of Berlin (TU Berlin).

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