Bucerius Law School doctoral prize: Tim Maciejewski and Johannes Arndt winners of award endowed by Noerr

Bucerius Law School has awarded Tim Maciejewski and Johannes Arndt each the doctoral prize for outstanding doctoral theses, which is endowed annually with 3,000 euros by our law firm.

“As a leading European law firm, academic excellence is very important to us,” said Kai-Michael Hingst, partner at Noerr’s Hamburg office and honorary professor at Bucerius Law School, during the award ceremony. “With the endowment of the doctoral prize, we want to encourage young lawyers to deal with legal issues in academic depth – also and especially in the context of societal, economic and technical developments.”

Tim Maciejewski was awarded the 2020 doctoral prize for his dissertation entitled “Non-Application Laws – A Constitutional Positioning between Legal Continuity, Separation of Powers, the Imperative of Legal Protection and the Prohibition of Retroactivity.” The dissertation takes up the tax law discourse on retroactive non-application laws and is distinguished by the work on constitutional principles, which has raised the previous research discussion to a much higher level.

 

Johannes Arndt received the 2021 doctoral prize for his dissertation “Bitcoin Ownership. The Necessity of Legal Allocation of Extra-legal, Extra-subjective Assets through Subjective Rights.” His doctoral thesis critically examines the prevailing opinion, which states that Bitcoins do not have the capacity to be owned, and opposes it with the “legal transaction theory” developed by him. Just like the ownership of things, the legal power of control over Bitcoins can according to his theory be transferred by agreement and transfer of possession.

 

 

Since the event could not take place last year due to Covid-19 contact restrictions, the doctoral prizes for 2020 and 2021 were now awarded during the Academic Celebration for the class of 2020 in the Laieszhalle in Hamburg.

Christian Bumke, Head of the Center for Academic Qualification (ZQ) at Bucerius Law School, gave the laudatory speech to the award winners.

More than 400 guests attended the event, which was also broadcast live on the Internet. The award ceremony speech was given by Hamburg’s Second Mayor Katharina Fegebank.