Bonavero Network Series: Temporality in Constitutional Theory

Join us for a conversation on the role of time in constitutional thought and practice. Philipp Dann will discuss his forthcoming monograph on temporality in constitutional theory in conversation with Timothy Endicott.

Philipp Dann

Philipp Dann is Professor at Humboldt University Berlin, where he holds the Chair in Public and Comparative Law and is currently serving as Dean of the Faculty of Law. Educated at Humboldt University of Berlin and the Kammergericht (first and second state exam), Frankfurt University (PhD and habilitation) and Harvard Law School (Master), he has been a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Public Law in Heidelberg, a visiting researcher at New York University (Emile Noel Fellow), the Georgetown Law Center in Washington D.C. and the National Law School Bangalore.

He has published 3 monographs, 10 conceptualized edited volumes and well over 50 peer-reviewed articles in German and in English and is the editor-in-chief of the quarterly journal “World Comparative Law”. Dann also advised governments and other parties on constitutional matters and questions of law and development. He taught at various universities in Germany, India and France.

In 2024, Philipp Dann was invited to conduct the Masterclass at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg and in 2025 continued to teach Masterclass in London, Delhi, Bogotá and Lagos. In 2026, he will lecture at the Collège de France in Paris. 

Dann works in international, comparative, German and European public law, using political and legal theory, historical and empirical perspectives. Main sites of his research are the law of democracy, federalism, development finance and temporality. An overarching interest in his works is the role of law in the encounters and entanglements between South and North. Through his writings and collaborative research projects he has given new impetus to the question of how law has shaped, has been shaped and is shaping global relations especially in a South-North perspective and not least through colonialism and its legacies. He is currently exploring the potentials (and pitfalls) for re-imagining public law and its scholarship in the 21st century through the colonial lens and wondering how to rethink public law and the role of legal scholarship in a truly global way mindful of the broader legacies of modernity and colonialism.

A hallmark of Dann’s academic activities are collaborations, often in transnational formats. He is the coordinator of the World Comparative Law Network and of the law and politics stream in the Indian European Advanced Research Network (IEARN), co-speaker of the German branch of ICON-S, the co-founder of the Law and Development Research Network (LDRN) and a principal investigator at the research cluster ‘Contestations of the Liberal Script’ (SCRIPTS). In 2025, he sets up the Center of Advanced Studies ‘Reflexive Globalization and the Law: Colonial Legacies and their implications in the 21st century’ (RefLex) at Humboldt University.

Timothy Endicott

Timothy Endicott is the Vinerian Professor of English Law. He writes on Constitutional and Administrative Law and Jurisprudence, with special interests in law and language and legal interpretation. He was a Fellow in Law at Balliol College from 1999 to 2020, and served as the Dean of the Faculty of Law for two terms, from 2007 to 2015. He is the author of Administrative Law, 5th ed (OUP 2021) and Vagueness in Law (OUP 2000).

After graduating with the AB in Classics and English from Harvard, he completed the MPhil in Comparative Philology in Oxford, studied Law at the University of Toronto, and practised as a litigation lawyer in Toronto. He completed the DPhil in Law in Oxford in 1998. He was appointed by Universidad Carlos III de Madrid to a Cátedra de Excelencia during 2016, and was a Distinguished Visitor in the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, in 2017 and 2021. He served as General Editor of the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies from 2015 to 2021.