My Story

I was born and raised in Hamburg, a port city that has always looked outward, toward trade, toward Europe, toward the rest of the world. That orientation has shaped everything since.

My legal education took me first to France, to the University of Toulouse (UT1) and then to Paris II (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 never an abstraction for me. It was the daily experience of moving between legal cultures, languages, and ways of arguing, German precision, French conceptual clarity, and learning to translate between them.

That movement has never really stopped. Early in my career, I worked inside the German Bundestag, watching EU law arrive not as doctrine but as political reality, something that had to be explained, defended, and occasionally fought over in committee rooms. I later worked at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, PwC Legal and at 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 positiosn at the Court of Justice of the European Union showed me the same body of law again, this time from the bench outward, where the words of a directive finally become a judgment.

Today I hold a position as Assistant Professor of European Law at Dublin City University, where I also serve as Deputy Director of the Brexit Institute and, at the same time, a guest researcher at the 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. 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 (the UK), and what happens when a state never joins it but has to live next door (Switzerland).

I think of myself as 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.

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.

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.