Dr. Corinna Coupette, a former research associate of the Otto Hahn Group on Financial Regulation at the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance, was awarded the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society for her dissertation “Juristische Netzwerkforschung (Legal Network Science)”. The Otto Hahn Medal has been awarded every year since 1978 to young researchers for outstanding scientific achievements, mostly in connection with their doctorate.

With her dissertation, Corinna Coupette adds her research on legal networks to the German legal discourse. Lawyers come into contact with networks on a daily basis, for example when they are looking for information or supporting corporate transactions. In doing so, they also produce networks themselves – especially social networks and citation networks. Corinna Coupette studies how legal phenomena can be represented as networks and investigates what we can gain from their analysis. Based on a specially compiled data set of decisions of the Federal Constitutional Court, she develops tools for the modelling, quantification and visualisation of law. Parallel to her doctorate, she studied computer science to acquire the necessary knowledge in informatics.

Today Corinna Coupette is a research associate at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, where she is doing her doctorate in computer science. She is also an affiliate of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law and a guest at the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance.

The award-winning work was published in 2019 by Mohr Siebeck and is open access. The eBook (German language) can be downloaded free of charge at: https://zenodo.org/record/2617115.

June 2020