Prof. Dr Georg von Wangenheim, a qualified economist and lawyer with a doctorate (Freiburg) and habilitation (Hamburg) in economics, is Head of the Department of Fundamentals of Law, Private Law and Economics of Civil Law. Before coming to Kassel, he worked at the former Max Planck Institute for Economics in Jena. In the meantime, he spent a year as a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley with funding from the DFG and, at the invitation of the law faculty there, at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona as a visiting professor. He has been researching and publishing in the field of economic analysis of law for 30 years. Special focuses are the evolution of law (Wangenheim 2017) and the interaction of laws and social norms.

He has been using the microeconomic toolkit to investigate the expected impact of blockchain technology on law and the repercussions of law on blockchain technology for several years. Concrete use cases include token-based security for microcredit and anti-theft security for smartphones (Wangenheim et al. 2019), as well as the potential role of blockchain in the registration of property rights (Wangenheim 2020). He is involved in the Metamorphoses GmbH-funded projects C2B and Crypto-Assets of the blockchain-center.eu at the University of Kassel.

His research also extends to the market penetration of technical innovations with normative significance (Müller/Wangenheim 2017; projects “INVERINS”, “BeSmart”, both with BMBF funding) and the effect of process cost distributions (Carbonara et al. 2015).

Other BMBF-funded research projects by Georg von Wangenheim are in the field of climate economics (“EnWorKS”, “DeGeb”).

He is vice-chairman of the German Law and Economics Association and was its chairman from 2007 to 2012. He is an Associate Editor of the International Review of Law and Economics