Bavarian Culture Prize 2023 for Philip M. Bender
On 16 November, our former research associate Philip M. Bender received the Bavarian Culture Prize 2023 by the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and the Arts. He was awarded in the science category for his dissertation entitled "Grenzen der Personalisierung des Rechts".
From left to right: Minister of Arts and Science Markus Blume, Dr Philip M. Bender and Chairman of the Board of Management of Bayernwerk AG Dr Egon Leo Westphal © Alex Schelbert
In his work, Philip M. Bender examines the possibilities and limits of the use of new customization technologies, such as those known from the field of personalised advertising, for legislation. His aim is to demonstrate the value of general law. His central thesis is that legislation based on algorithms and orientated solely on economic considerations would attack the foundations of a liberal social order and lead to a system of micro-socialist external control.
The award ceremony took place on 16 November at the Eisbach Studios in Munich. The event, which was broadcast by several television stations, was hosted by Bayernwerk AG in partnership with the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and the Arts. The prize was presented by the Bavarian Minister of Art and Science, Markus Blume, and the Chairman of the Board of Bayernwerk AG, Dr Egon Leo Westphal.
The thesis, supervised by Professor Grigoleit (LMU), was written at the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance, where Bender worked from 2019 to 2021 as a research assistant in Professor Dr Dr h.c. Wolfgang Schön's Department of Corporate and Tax Law. Bender's dissertation "Grenzen der Personalisierung des Rechts" (Limits of the Personalisation of Law), with which he had already been accepted into the Körber Foundation's alumni programme in June as a finalist for its study prize, was also awarded the Science Prize of the German Foundation for Law and Informatics in September and the LMU Faculty Prize in October.
During his time at the Institute, Bender was a lecturer at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) and a Visiting Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School (February and March 2020). In November 2020, he completed a research stay at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg, and in July 2021 he took part in the Law and Economics course at the Study Centre Gerzensee of the Swiss National Bank. He studied law at the LMU (First State Exam 2016), at Paris II/Panthéon-Assas (Licence 2013, Maîtrise 2017) and at Yale Law School (LL.M. 2019, Bar Exam 2019) as well as philosophy at the LMU and the École normale supérieure (ENS) in Paris. From 2016 to 2018, he completed his legal clerkship at the Higher Regional Court of Munich with a station at the German Embassy in Tehran/Iran (Second State Exam 2018). Bender has been a Bavarian notary assessor since November 2021 and has been working in this function at the Federal Chamber of Notaries in Brussels since January 2024.
November 2023