Project description

What exactly is a bailiff? What is he or she allowed to do and what should the professional training of this most important enforcement profession look like today? Is the traditional mere practice training for bailiff education nowadays still sufficient? What developments are there in the modernization of civil procedural enforcement law, which serves in particular to enforce court decisions? And how is "judicial law", i.e. the law governing the court system, the legal professions and their training, including electronic civil procedure and the electronification of civil justice as a cross-sectional discipline of the digitalization of judicial processes, developing? The new research center at the University of Kassel, i.e. an academic competence center for contemporary and contentious issues of enforcement and judicial law, deals with questions like these scientifically.

This scientific competence center for basic justice topics is unique in the German-speaking world and was established as part of a third-party funded project supported by the German Bailiffs' Association (DGVB e.V.) on the basis of many years of cooperation with the head of the research center, Prof. Dr. Nikolaj Fischer.

The research center began its work at the beginning of July 2024 at the Institute for Commercial Law - there at the Chair for Civil Law and Civil Procedure Law. The research centre has already initiated initial cooperation with a thematically related department at Bielefeld University, the Chair of Civil Law, Civil Procedure Law, Methodology, Law of Digitalization and Legal Tech, Prof. Dr. Marie Herberger.

In particular, the focus of the research center is nothing less than an academic novelty: while there have long been university institutes for lawyers' law (for example at the University of Cologne) or for lawyers' and notaries' law (at the University of Bielefeld), there is no such research center for the subject area of enforcement and judicial law in Germany, Austria, Luxembourg and the German-speaking regions of Switzerland and Belgium. In addition, judicial law in particular is still far from being established as a separate research discipline at German universities, colleges or research institutions.

The German bailiff system in particular has received little (e.g. scientific) attention to date. In particular, legal policy at federal and state level still finds it difficult in many places to recognize the need for modern bailiff training. This is demonstrated by the different answers to the question of modern academic-based training throughout Germany. With the exception of the state of Baden-Württemberg, which has already implemented such academic training since September 2016, and Berlin and Brandenburg, which have now introduced training reforms, many state justice administrations are still taking a wait-and-see approach, not to mention being reluctant to reform. Regardless of this, bailiffs have in fact long since embodied their own professional profile and are no longer just mid-level civil servants of justice by virtue of - equally important - further professional training.

A "Research Center for Enforcement and Judicial Law" at a German university is therefore certainly pioneer work. It is helpful here that the University of Kassel has been successfully training commercial lawyers for many years in the Bachelor's and Master's degree courses in "Commercial Law" (Institut für Wirtschaftsrecht), right up to the doctorate and habilitation in law. This combines legal and business studies content in a career-oriented way and (as an alternative to the classic "state examination" training) opens up access to many exciting professions with a legal focus, such as company inhouse lawyer, tax consultant or auditor. In addition, the Research Centre also offers young academics the opportunity to gain qualifications at the Chair of Civil Law and Civil Procedure Law, which is responsible for the organization of the Research Centre.