Emanuel V. Towfigh
Senior Research Fellow, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods
J.D., University of Münster, 2002
Dr. jur., University of Münster, 2005

Emanuel Towfigh is a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, Germany, one of Europe’s most renowned research institutes for behavioral law and economics. He teaches law and economics, public administration, public law, and law and religion. He will teach Economic Analysis of Public Law at the University of Virginia in the fall of 2012.

Towfigh's scholarship revolves around the question of how law can have a reasonable and effective influence on individual behavior in order to solve specific societal problems. His current research focuses on constitutional law and constitutional theory, applies a behaviorally informed perspective and heavily draws on empirical methods. Within this framework, he is currently working on a book on political parties and legitimacy, and on experiments in a field that could best be described as "behavioral public choice." Towfigh’s work has a focus on legal scholarship methods, namely on social science approaches to the law and on comparative constitutional law. He is co-editor of the leading German-language law and economics textbook.

Towfigh studied law, economics and Chinese at the Universities of Münster (Germany) and Nanjing (China), and subsequently completed his legal clerkship. He earned his Ph.D. with an award-winning dissertation on the legal constitution of religious communities under state and religious legal regimes at the University of Münster in 2005, where he worked as a research associate between 2003 and 2007, and where he has taught Public Administration and Decision Theory since 2009. He serves as an elected member of the Young Academy at the German National Academy of Sciences. In 2011-12 he was a Global Fellow and Hauser Research Scholar at New York University School of Law.