Research

Research topics and projects:

  • State-church law between the promotion of religion (communities) in their social diversity and the requirements of effective danger prevention (Heinig/Munsonius/Unruh/Albers).
  • “Religious law as multi-level law”. Analysis of the interlocking of Union law, the ECHR and selected legal systems of the Member States as well as the transformation effects emanating from European law in the various systems of state-church law (Heinig/Munsonius/Unruh/Albers).
  • >Representation crises - in the mirror of constitutional, higher education and Protestant canon law (Heinig).
  • History and academic history of religious law in Germany from the end of the German Empire to the beginnings of the Bonn Republic (Heinig/Basse).
  • Legal Issues of Social Security (Heinig).
  • “Constitutionalization” and “constitution” in the debates on transnational, international and supranational legal orders (Heinig/Schwab).
  • Commentaries on Art. 4 GG (Heinig, in: Huber/Voßkuhle) and Art. 140 GG (Heinig in: BK, Unruh in: Huber/Voßkuhle).
  • The office in terms of constitutional theory (Munsonius).
  • Pathos formulas in canon law (Munsonius)



Doctoral dissertations:

Currently, doctoral dissertation projects on the following topics are under the initial supervision of Professor Heinig:

  • Basic social security

  • Individualist and collectivist aspects of human dignity

  • The separation of church and state in 1918 and its prehistory

  • Politics in legal perception



If you are interested in doing a doctorate at the faculty under the supervision of Professor Heinig, please read the doctoral regulations and check the requirements stated there.

Thematically, the chair supervises doctoral projects in the areas of constitutional law, religious and ecclesiastical law, cultural law and social law.

Theses on the following topics have been completed:

  • Religious Membership Law

  • Religious law in Marxism-Leninism

  • Religious subsistence minimum in asylum and aliens law

  • Freedom of association and its institutional prerequisites

  • Unconditional basic income

  • Organisational Power of Religious Communities under Public Law

  • Friendliness of the Basic Law to International Law

  • Legal concept and legal requirements in evangelical church law

  • Advisory board models in the establishment of Islamic theology at state universities and Islamic religious instruction

  • Legal disobedience in West German legal debates (1949-1989)

  • Models of jurisprudence in legal education

  • Church Asylum

  • Reform approaches in the church tax law of the Protestant church

  • Social security for soldiers deployed abroad

  • Historical arguments in law

  • Church data protection law in the light of European law



At other faculties were co-supervised:

  • Protestant Diaconia and the Idea of Subsidiarity in the Social Legislation of the Bonn Republic (Faculty of Philosophy, University of Erfurt)

  • Debates on human dignity after 1945 (Faculty of Theology, University of Göttingen)

  • Canon Law and Marriage (Faculty of Theology, University of Göttingen)

  • Conceptions of the state in Protestant ethics in the 1950s and 1960s (Faculty of Theology, University of Göttingen)