We welcome ZENiT Research Fellow Alexandra Windsberger to the Zukunftskolleg
Alexandra Windsberger is one of our new ZENiT Research Fellows from the 1st call for applications for ZENiT Fellowships. She has started her fellowship on 1 April and is affiliated with the Department of Law.
After studying law in Saarbrücken, Alexandra initially worked as a research assistant in the criminal law department of the Faculty of Law and Economics and as a lecturer at Saarland University. During this time, she completed her doctorate at the chair of Prof. Dr. Marco Mansdörfer with a thesis in commercial criminal law on the topic of bankruptcy and criminal liability risks of the entrepreneur in crisis (awarded the Dr. Eduard Martin Prize of the Saarland University Society). From 2016 to 2019, she completed her legal clerkship at the Palatinate Higher Regional Court in Zweibrücken. She has been admitted to the bar since 2019 and works part-time as a criminal defense lawyer of counsel with a focus on criminal defense in white-collar criminal matters.
"Ever since my doctoral phase, I have been particularly interested in the interfaces and intersections between criminal law and philosophy. Both disciplines deal with big questions such as: What is guilt? What is an act? What is truth? Is punishment really necessary in a society? Is justice an objective value? I therefore decided to take up a second degree in philosophy (Master's, Saarbrücken University) to try to bring together the best of both disciplines, which I really enjoy."
Alexandra has been a lecturer for key competencies at Saarland University since 2021 and, after returning from her parental leave, has been a senior researcher (post-doc) at the University of Konstanz with Prof. Liane Wörner since April 2023.
Her project deals with a question that more or less concerns us all: when, why and to what extent do we actually have to help and stand up for each other and under what conditions can the refusal to help or the non-fulfilment of duties be sanctioned with the sharpest sword of a state, namely criminal punishment?
This requires a fundamental understanding of the legal and philosophical dimensions of the category of action "omission", which is to be developed in this project. In an international and interdisciplinary dialogue between experts from jurisprudence and philosophy, an attempt will be made to recognize dimensions of the prerequisites for the attribution of omissions in order to draw conclusions about the basic dogmatic structures of criminal law. The criminal law solutions in cases of omission depend heavily on the criminal theory in discourse with the legal philosophical concepts in a state. This requires a comparative legal analysis within and outside Europe, which will deal not only with the prevailing legal systems but also with different concepts of the state and, from this perspective, analyze the state of interdependencies between legal theory, legal philosophy and criminal law.
We wish her a good start and all the best for her time at the Zukunftskolleg!