Christian Boulanger

Christian Boulanger serves as a Research Fellow and Department Coordinator at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, a position he has held since November 2020. His work bridges traditional legal scholarship with cutting-edge digital humanities methodologies, focusing on the empirical analysis of legal theory production.

Boulanger earned his PhD in political science from Free University of Berlin after studying modern history, law, and political science in Heidelberg, Berlin, and Seattle. His academic career includes significant roles at Humboldt University of Berlin where he served as Academic Coordinator for the Leibniz Prize Project 'Recht im Kontext' (2018-2020), Academic Officer at the Forum Transregionale Studien (2012-2016), and Research Associate at various law-related institutes including the Law and Society Institute Berlin.

His research interests center on the sociology of law and socio-legal studies, with particular emphasis on comparative historical approaches to legal scholarship. Boulanger has pioneered the application of bibliometric and scientometric methods to analyze legal doctrine, developing innovative network analysis techniques to map the evolution of socio-legal thought across national contexts. His work on comparative constitutionalism and judicial studies provides critical insights into how legal knowledge circulates internationally.

Boulanger's publication record reveals a methodological trajectory toward increasingly sophisticated digital humanities approaches to legal scholarship. His recent work demonstrates how citation network analysis can uncover hidden patterns in legal theory development, particularly through his Legal Theory Knowledge Graph project which systematically maps scholarly connections in socio-legal studies. This research has significant implications for understanding how legal knowledge is produced and disseminated across different national traditions.

Boulanger leads several major research initiatives including the Legal Theory Knowledge Graph project, 'A different legal science - German sociology of law after 1945', and the international collaboration 'Socio-legal trajectories in Germany and the UK: cultures, actors and institutions'. These projects collectively examine how socio-legal scholarship has evolved differently in various national contexts while maintaining transnational connections. His methodological innovations in bibliometric analysis of legal literature represent a significant contribution to the field of digital legal studies.