Dr Johanna Stark, Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance, will take up a Professorship of Taxation Law at the University of Oxford on 1 October 2026.
Johanna Stark’s research blends legal analysis and philosophical inquiry in tax, business and general private law. She studied Philosophy, Logic, and Philosophy of Science in Munich and Oxford before completing her legal studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich in 2011. Following her award-winning PhD on philosophical issues of regulatory competition (2016), published as a monograph titled “Law for Sale” (OUP 2019), she qualified for German legal practice at the Higher Regional Court of Munich in 2017. Subsequently, she joined the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance as a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Business and Tax Law and taught as a lecturer at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. She successfully completed her habilitation there in the summer of 2024 with a monograph on error of law in (German) private law, and obtained venia legendi in Civil Law, Corporate Law, Tax Law, and Jurisprudence.
Johanna Stark has been a vital part of the Institute’s Department of Business and Tax Law as a Senior Research Fellow. Her impactful research – spanning topics from private law theory to European business regulation to international tax justice – has received numerous prizes and awards. These include the recognition of her dissertation as one of the “Law Books of the Year” (2019), the Otto Schmidt Prize for the Europeanization and Internationalization of Law (2020), and the Therese von Bayern Prize (2023).
In her new role at Oxford, Johanna Stark will continue with her research on tax law and policy, with an emphasis on the intersection between tax and business law as well as the philosophical underpinnings of both fields. She will remain connected to the Institute as a research affiliate.
July 2026