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Overview

Professor Michael Bohlander

Chair in Global Law and SETI Policy


Affiliations
Affiliation
Chair in Global Law and SETI Policy in the Durham Law School

Biography

Professor Bohlander has been the International Co-Investigating Judge in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia since 2015. From 2017 until 2022, he was also an international judge at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers. He joined Durham University in 2004 as a full professor, having previously been a life-tenured member of the German judiciary since 1991.  

He has published over 20 books, more than 160 chapters and articles, and over 60 book reviews on German law, English and Welsh criminal law, comparative and international criminal law, and Islamic law.

His work has been translated into Chinese, Farsi, French, Khmer, Spanish and Turkish. It has been widely cited by and before courts and authorities in several national and international jurisdictions, among them the Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory, the Constitutional Court of Colombia, the German Federal Constitutional Court and the German Federal Court of Justice, the Kosovo Supreme Court, the New Zealand Court of Appeal, the Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas, the International Criminal Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the International Criminal Court, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon,  the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, as well as the Law (Reform) Commissions of Ireland, New Zealand, Scotland, and Victoria (Australia).

Since 2020, his main focus has been on the consequences of a potential contact with extraterrestrial intelligence for human law and society in the wider sense. 

 

Research interests

  • Contact with extraterrestrial intelligence and its impact on human law
  • Legal aspects of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)
  • International and comparative criminal law

Publications

Authored book

Book review

Chapter in book

Conference Paper

Edited book

Journal Article

Manual

Newspaper/Magazine Article

Other (Print)

Scholarly Edition

Supervision students