Katharina Isabel Schmidt
Katharina Isabel Schmidt is a J.S.D. candidate at Yale Law School. Before coming to New Haven in 2012, she obtained law degrees in Germany and the United Kingdom.
Katharina is interested in why legal realism captured the imagination of American jurists but seemingly never became part of mainstream German legal thought. She seeks to shed light on this question through a comparative-historical analysis of the American Legal Realist movement and the German Free Law movement. Katharina’s other research and teaching interests include contract law, tort law, comparative law, constitutional theory, private law theory, Anglo-American legal history, European legal history, legal theory and philosophy, legal sociology and anthropology, critical perspectives on legal education and the legal profession, law and literature, and transnational intellectual history.
Katharina has presented her work at various conferences on both sides of the Atlantic. Her work is published or forthcoming in Der Staat, Comparative Legal History, Law and History Review, German Studies Review, and American Journal of Comparative Law. Katharina is concurrently pursuing a Ph.D. in History at Princeton University.
Doctoral Committee
Professors James Q. Whitman (chair), John Fabian Witt (reader), Paul W. Kahn (reader), and Dieter Grimm (reader)
Education
Ph.D. (History), Princeton University (in progress)
LL.M., Yale Law School, 2013
B.C.L., University of Oxford, 2011
Baccalaureus Legum (German and English Law), University of Cologne, 2010
LL.B. (German and English Law), University College London, 2010
Contact Information
katharina.i.schmidt@yale.edu