Award  |  03/20/2023

Anja Geller to receive the Dieter Rampacher Prize of the Max Planck Society

Lawyer Anja Geller is awarded the Dieter Rampacher Prize 2022 for her early doctorate. She completed her dissertation at the age of 26. The title of her dissertation thesis is “Social Scoring by States: Legitimacy under European Law - with References to China”.

Anja Geller
The lawyer Anja Geller receives the Max Rampacher Prize of the Max Planck Society.

In her work, Anja Geller shows, in particular, that social scoring is by no means only - as is commonly assumed - a concept that is widespread mainly in China. In this context, she discusses how the legal framework can be designed to minimize constitutionally critical aspects while at the same time maximizing the benefits for the common good.  Reto M. Hilty supervised the thesis as doctoral advisor; its development was supported by the Institute and it was accepted by the LMU Munich. In the meantime, it has been published as an electronic university publication and is available online free of charge.


Anja Geller is already the fourth of the 39 award winners to receive the prize for her dissertation at our Institute. Christoph Cordes (1993), Loretta Würtenberger (1997) and Matthias Leistner (1999) received the prize for their doctorates at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Patent, Copyright and Competition Law, as the Institute was then called.


With the Dieter Rampacher Award, the Max Planck Society annually honors its youngest doctoral student for his or her outstanding doctoral degree, in order to provide an incentive for an early doctorate. The prize was endowed in 1985 by Hermann Rampacher, sustaining member of the Max Planck Society; it is in memory of his brother Dieter Rampacher, a physics student at the TH Stuttgart who was killed in action in 1945 at the age of twenty. In 2011, Carsten A. Rampacher, the founder's son, and his consulting firm, which is also a sustaining member of the Max Planck Society, took over the funding of the prize. The Dieter Rampacher Prize 2022 will be awarded during the Annual General Meeting of the Max Planck Society in Göttingen in June 2023 and carries a prize money of € 2,400.