Dr. Dana Schmalz, LL.M.

Dana Schmalz is an associated MeDiMi researcher and a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg. Her work focuses on legal theory, migration law, and human rights. Dana holds a Ph.D. in Law from the University of Frankfurt (2017) and an LL.M. in Comparative Legal Thought from Cardozo Law School, New York. From 2011 to 2016, Dana worked as a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg/Berlin, and from 2017 to 2018 as a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen. Visiting research fellowships brought her to Tel Aviv, Florence, and New York. Dana held visiting professorships at the University of Bremen and the University of Jena, and moreover taught in Berlin, Göttingen, and Mainz. In 2023/2024, Dana has been a Co-convenor of the research group “Internalizing Borders” at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Bielefeld. Dana’s first book “Refugees, Democracy and the Law. Political Rights at the Margins of the State” was published in 2020 (Routledge). Her second book on how the population growth discourse shaped law and politics (“Das Bevölkerungsargument”) was published in 2025 (Suhrkamp).

Contact: schmalz@mpil.de