My Story

I was born and raised in Hamburg, a German port city that has always looked outward, towards trade, towards Europe, towards the rest of the world. That has shaped everything ever since and eventually brought me to my current position as an Assistant Professor of European law at the School of Law and Government of Dublin City University (DCU). At DCU, I teach graduate and undergraduate courses in EU law, EU Institutional Law, EU Law & Brexit and Legal Research Methods. I have published several peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and op-eds as well as my first book Dealing with Rule of Law Crises in the EU, Hart 2026.

My legal education, however, took me first to France, to the University of Toulouse (UT1) and then to the University of Paris II (Panthéon-Assas); two institutions that have trained generations of Europe's civil servants, judges, and diplomats. Studying law in English and French, in the French system, meant that European law was always very tangible for me. It was the daily experience of moving between legal cultures, languages, and ways of arguing in English, German precision, French conceptual clarity, and learning to translate between them.

That movement has never really stopped. Even though I aspired to become an academic, I was eager to understand the law from various perspectives and gain practical insights. Early in my career, I worked at the German Bundestag, watching EU law interact with the national legal system, something that had to be explained, learned, defended, and occasionally fought over in committee rooms. I later worked at international law firms such as Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, PwC Legal and at the tech company Delivery Hero. Seeing how the same rules look from the perspective of a global law firm and a fast-moving company navigating regulation in real time. Two visiting positions at the Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg showed me the same body of law again, this time from the bench outward, where the words of a directive or regulation become a judgment.

This tour d’Europe brought me to my current position as Assistant Professor of European Law at Dublin City University, where I also serve as Deputy Director of the Brexit Institute and Investigator in the Horizon Europe REGROUP, Express2 and PROSPER projects, focusing on the rule of law, the European social contract and economic competitiveness. Additionally, I am a guest researcher at the Swiss University of Zurich, in a country that sits outside the Union yet is bound to it more tightly, and more intricately, than almost any other. Consequently, I split my time between Dublin and Zurich, which means I live the two central puzzles of contemporary EU law simultaneously: what happens when a state leaves the club as the UK did, and what happens when a state never joins it but has to live next door, as is the case with Switzerland.

My main research interest lies in European law, the rule of law, EU-US comparative law, law & technology, trade law, geopolitics & foreign affairs. My research follows from that experience rather than the other way around. I write about the rule of law because I have seen, from inside a national parliament, how fragile institutional norms can be. I write about EU–Swiss relations because I now live the relationship, not just study it. And I write about trade, technology, and geopolitical strategy because I have watched EU regulation take shape from a law firm's conference room, a start-up's legal department, and a courtroom in Luxembourg, three places that rarely compare notes, but should.

I consider myself a genuinely European lawyer, not in the sense of holding a passport or a job title, but in the sense of having been trained, tested, and employed inside three different legal and political systems (Germany, France, Ireland). Germany gave me the discipline. France gave me the conceptual apparatus. Ireland gave me the academic home and the vantage point of a small, adaptable state inside the Union. Switzerland gives me the outside view, the reminder that the EU's authority is never automatic, that it has to be negotiated, democratically justified, and renewed. That’s also what I talk about in my regular media appearances.  

If there is a single thread running through it, it's this: I have spent my career refusing to choose between the academic's distance and the practitioner's proximity to power. I'd rather sit close enough to both to be useful to people who have to make decisions, in a ministry, in a chancellery, in a boardroom, under real constraints, on real timelines.