The Daimler and Benz Foundation regularly has cause to be pleased with its scholarship-holders and their successful research work. Law scholar Prof. Dr. Hanjo Hamann was awarded the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize 2022, which is bestowed once a year on ten young academics by the German Research Foundation and is regarded as Germany’s most prestigious award for up-and-coming young researchers. More than 150 young academics were nominated this year; Hamann is the first German lawyer in twenty years to receive this honor.

Hamann has doctorates in both law and economics. In his research, he forges a bridge between these two disciplines by using theories from economics and behavioral science, along with computer-assisted methods for empirical text analysis in the fields of contract and corporate law. Hamann is dedicated to empirical legal research, a sub-discipline of jurisprudence that has already come into focus in academic circles in the United States but is still an underrepresented field in Germany. With his dissertation on “Evidence-Based Jurisprudence,” which attracted attention in both national and international professional circles, this researcher has carried out pioneering and fundamental work in this area. He is also committed to the digital development of legal didactics.

With a research project dealing with empirical methods in jurisprudence for the application case of rent reduction, which Hamann is now further developing at the Free University of Berlin and at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, he was accepted into the Daimler and Benz Foundation’s scholarship program for junior professors and postdocs in 2018. In 2020, he then earned a Master of the Science of Law at Stanford Law School. In April 2022, Hamann took up a position at Wiesbaden’s EBS Universität für Wirtschaft und Recht as the first German Professor for Private Law, Intellectual Property, and Legal Linguistics.