Nora Markard

Nora Markard is a Professor of Public Law and Human Rights and Co-Director of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg “Legal Unity and Pluralism” at the University of Münster, Germany. Her recent work has focused on inequalities, social rights, and migration, across constitutional and international law. Her most recent book, “Jura not alone” (with Ronen Steinke, 2024), is an invitation to engage with the law’s political dimensions, showing how it can be used for social change.

She studied law at the Free University Berlin and at the Sorbonne in Paris and holds an MA in International Peace and Security from King’s College London and a PhD in law from Humboldt University Berlin. She has been a visiting fellow at the University of Michigan, Columbia Law School, and at NYU’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, and a W&L Global Teaching Fellow at Washington & Lee University. Among other commitments, she is an editor of the German Law Journal and a member of the Board of Trustees of the German Institute for Human Rights.

Nora Markard was instrumental in promoting legal clinics in Germany and is a founding executive board member of the strategic litigation NGO “Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte” (Society for Civil Rights), which has already won several major Federal Constitutional Court cases. She is counsel of record in an equal pay case pending before the Constitutional Court and has led third-party interventions before the European Court of Human Rights on so-called push-backs of migrants.

Contact: nm4599@nyu.edu

Research Project

Holistic Liberty and the Right to Health. Using the right to health as an example, the project aims to develop a holistic concept of liberty that considers the relations of support and solidarity that freedom often relies on. Health risks are such that individuals are typically not able to protect themselves, including by saving up for any unexpected medical needs. Solidarity schemes, such as health insurance, have therefore long been a mechanism to secure liberty. Our dependence on others for our health also became glaringly obvious in other ways during the Covid-19 pandemic. This topic therefore lends itself to an exploration of a relational and more holistic concept of liberty. An ongoing book project has been seeking to show that an analysis of apex court jurisprudence bears out this approach by deriving positive obligations from classic liberties, and that concept of liberty underlying it is less reductive than traditional narratives will have it. This research project will build on that empirical, inductive work by centering the normative strand, developing an argument for a holistic concept of liberty and the claims on solidarity it makes, illustrated by examples from comparative constitutional law and human rights law.