Main Focus
Frederic Jasper Kunstreich works on the intersection between economic history, legal theory and legal history. His research interests include new institutional economics, insolvency law, industrialization and urbanity. He was previously coordinator of the research project ,History of Legal Scholarship in the Max Planck Society since 1945’ and a guest researchers at the MPI for the history of science in Berlin.
Project
Completed Projects
Curriculum Vitae
Jasper Kunstreich studied Law, History, and Political Science, graduating with a BA from the University of Heidelberg in 2010. He was a fellow of the Studienkolleg zu Berlin 2010/2011, a joint initiative of the German National Scholarship Foundation, the Hertie Foundation, and the Center for Advanced Studies Berlin. Jasper went on studying Economic and Social History at the University of Oxford, first in a masters degree and later as doctoral student of Professors Avner Offer and Joshua Getzler. In his doctoral thesis he investigated the development of insolvency regulation in Germany between 1815 and 1871 with a particular focus on local communities and the economic development of that time. He was awarded scholarships and prizes from the German National Scholarship Foundation, the Economic and Social Research Council UK, the Scatcherd Scholarship Oxford, St. John’s College Oxford, the Economic History Society and the German Academic Exchange Society. Since 2016, he is a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory (formerly Max Planck Institute for European Legal History), focusing on the history of commercial law and institutional economics.
Publications (Selection)
- Bankruptcy as Standortpolitik, in: Margrit Schulte-Beerbühl & Albrecht Cordes (eds.), Dealing with Economic Failure in Historical Perspecitve (Frankfurt, 2016), pp. 193-214.
- Stadt, Land, Recht – ein prosopographischer Versuch, in: Peter Schröder (Hrsg), Der Staat als Genossenschaft. Zum rechtshistorischen und politischen Werk Otto von Gierkes, Baden-Baden 2021, 35–57.
- Zunft und Unordnung. Zur Rechtsstellung der Zünfte in Frankfurt am Main und Hamburg, 1350-1380, in: Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Germanistische Abteilung 139 (2022), 86–111.
Research Communication
Yearbook 2022 Between Think Tank and Law Faculty: Legal Scholarship within the Max Planck Society