Dr. Arian Henning awarded the Bucerius Law School doctoral thesis prize sponsored by Noerr

Dr Arian Henning is this year’s winner of the Bucerius Law School prize for the best doctoral thesis. This year’s award for an outstanding thesis in the field of law, which comes with prize money of €5,000, was once again sponsored by Noerr.

“Justification through learning systems – explainability as an element of the new architecture for legal reasoning” is the title of the prize-winning doctoral thesis. In it, Arian Henning looks at how algorithmic systems that are able to adapt their decision-making behaviour each time a decision is made can be used in the application of law without undermining the architecture for legal reasoning under the rule of law. The thesis was supervised by Professor Dr. Dr. h.c. Christoph Engel (Max Planck Institute for Behavioural Economics).

The prize was handed over by Simone Schönen, a partner from Noerr’s Hamburg office, during Bucerius Law School’s academic ceremony for the class of 2026. The laudation was delivered by Professor Dr. Christian Bumke, who holds the Commerzbank Foundation chair for Fundamentals of Law at Bucerius Law School, who stated, “This work is a prime example of innovative interdisciplinary research. It draws on non-legal knowledge from the behavioural and computer sciences in an exemplary manner for legal studies and on this basis is able to provide important insights for the law. Finally, the insights gained from it are of immense practical relevance for our approach to AI.”

Simone Schönen emphasised: “We want to encourage talented academics to get to the bottom of things, to question supposedly established findings and to enrich our knowledge with new insights.”